


This Week It Rained

by halotolerant



Category: The Professionals
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Backstory, Disability, First Kiss, First Meetings, Homophobia, Multi, Weather
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-08
Updated: 2012-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-15 21:59:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/532226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>So that was it, Ray thought. Bodie was an unstable loner who wanted no-one and that nobody wanted</i>
</p>
<p>Ray Doyle is not best pleased by his CI5 partner assignment, but determined to make the best of it – it’s his career after all. And as the years pass, he grows pretty accustomed to Bodie after all. In fact, maybe too accustomed.</p>
<p>Getting to know someone, all of someone, can be more than painful, it can be friendship-breaking, and when a sudden tragedy exposes a whole new side to Bodie's secrets, Ray isn't sure he can cope with what Bodie’s been keeping secret, or with the fact that Bodie did keep it secret, all these years.</p>
<p>Trying to help someone desperately vulnerable, struggling to deal with his feelings, can Ray work out whether this partnership has finally reaching breaking point? And if so, where do they go from here?</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Week It Rained

**Author's Note:**

> **Additional Warnings Apply** : This fic contains themes of congenital childhood disability and reference to serious illness in children as well as bereavment. Characters use ableist and homophobic language. Please consider whether this will upset or trigger you before reading. 
> 
> **Notes** : Thank you to the mods for the CI5 Box of Tricks challenge for making this all possible! Thank you to my wonderful artist Rain for the gorgeous artwork. Thank you to my beta elfwhistletree for hours of discussion and knot-wrangling. 
> 
> **Dedication** : For R.L. You deserved more.

 

\- - -

Prologue

\- - -

- \- -

_1975._

“The thing is,” Ray said, rubbing his fingers over his beer glass, too frustrated to care that repeating his worries would scarcely solve them , “I’ve worked bloody hard to get where I am.”

Picking up the glass, he drained it, and with a sympathetic expression Jane pushed over his second. She was a shop assistant he’d met whilst buying his mother’s birthday present; blonde, with legs that went on forever and apparently fond of loose, folksy blouses worn without a bra. He had been aware since picking her up that evening that if he could just get over this one hell of a day, his night had every chance of improving.

But getting over it was, it seemed, more than he could do.

“He’ll louse it up,” Ray insisted, taking another gulp of beer. He was too hot. It had been a long, choking day at the CI5 headquarters, which he had recently discovered to be not the state-of-the-art facility he’d imagined, but an ancient series of terraces where too many people squeezed into rooms that no one had bothered to renovate since before the war, and where in fact the odd map of Europe circa. 1939 could still be found wedged into a window frame against winter drafts and any kind of summer breeze. 

“He’ll louse it up, he’ll just completely lose it and... piss a lot of people off and then I’ll be out too, or reassigned, and all the decent blokes are gone now, of course.”

Jane sighed, and made another sympathetic face, at the same time managing to convey that the topic was not, perhaps, unlimited in its interest.

Taking the hint, Ray managed some fairly generic question about her day at work, and she, smiling with satisfaction, launched into an anecdote about a customer who’d wanted the same handbag in three colours or... Ray didn’t quite follow it, just monitoring the tone of her voice, smiling when she did, laughing in the right places, because all he could think, still, was that it was ridiculous for Mr Cowley to expect anyone to work with a man like William Bodie.

Let alone be his bloody partner.

In the years Ray had spent walking the streets, as juvenile delinquent and copper in turn, he’d honed his instincts pretty well, and Bodie was the kind of man people on both sides of the law crossed the road to avoid. He had those cold eyes, the kind that watched you carefully, stripped of expression, like a lazy reptile not about to expend more effort than the kill stroke.

You didn’t get more than a week into CI5 training without hearing the stories. Of which there were several.

Today at the assignment session, even before Bodie had come into the room, everyone had been watching Ray without bothering to hide it. He’d been able to see them thinking how strange it was that he  – the highest scoring in almost every category their cohort had been assessed in – had been left standing alone when the partner assignments had been made. Not all of them had probably enjoyed his embarrassment consciously, but across the sea of faces confronting him there was a little glow of assuaged resentment.

Which had not faded as the session progressed.

“On this occasion, with three dropping out in training, the numbers mean we have to partner you, Doyle, with one of your predecessors,” Macklin – a man who until that moment Ray had been quite inclined to like - had explained briskly. And the door had opened, someone had gasped, Ray registering who had entered and barely having time to brace himself before Macklin had said it, his voice full of dry amusement:

“Doyle. 4.5. This is 3.7 – Bodie. Bodie this is Doyle. Have fun together, now.”

There had been a heavy silence.

“Charmed,” Bodie had said, just loud enough to be audible at the back of the room, and then, with a smirk, had promptly left again, as if to say he didn’t even care to see Ray’s reaction.

Someone – Ray had no idea who, or they would be currently in possession of at least two less teeth – had given a low whistle.

Macklin held up a hand to stem what was now a gathering wave of mirth. “Right! All of you, get out of here! This is your last weekend of freedom, everything you’ve done so far in your lives, even the training, is nursery school, alright? The real work starts on Monday and don’t even think of being hung-over.”

 “...and then she said ‘Oh, that’s funny, I think I looked up the catalogue for leather!’” Jane gave a snort of laughter, reminding Ray to chip in with his own, and take another gulp of his beer rather than simply clenching it so hard he risked smashing the glass.

Evidently his noises had been appreciated – she granted him another sympathetic smile, sticking out her lower lip and patting his knee, and then, just slightly, his inner thigh; he angled round to give gentle encouragement.

“Oh poor Ray, surely this man isn’t so awful? Can’t you ask your boss for a change?”

“Cowley knows everything that goes on at... at where I work, it’ll have been his decision.” Ray took the opportunity to reach out and push back a few strands of her hair, bringing them closer together, and she smiled; she smelt of white wine and rose-based perfume and that slight saltiness of make-up on a woman’s face when she flushes, and he wanted her.

But still, he heard himself talking – the words, the thoughts, wouldn’t stop. “It can only be because of Cowley that Bodie’s still on the squad – two other blokes have flat out refused to work with him, and they’re pushing pens themselves now and he’s still out there, and now he’s my problem.”

She frowned. “On the squad? I thought you said worked in sales?”

“Yeah, uh, in-joke,” he finished his second beer and smiled at her. “Hey, how about some fresh air, and I’ll try and change the record, honest.”

She grinned, and allowed him to lead her out to his car. Back at her flat, she let him get his hands into her blouse and work at her breasts until she was moaning softly and pulling him into the bedroom, stripping herself quickly and pulling him down onto her, ready and welcoming; he slid home with a groan of relief, and was pleased to hear her echo it back to him, but even as he moved on her, all he could think about was the stupid, arrogant, cold, unlovely face of his new partner, William Andrew Philip Bodie.

\- - -

“Bodie, eh? You must have pissed off the Cow good and proper,” said Fields, which given that he was Bodie’s peer from the third cohort was scarcely encouraging. “I suppose you’ve heard what happened when we were all doing basic training? How he half-killed the bloke he was assigned to partner?”

“I heard,” Ray muttered. He was drinking again. The last Friday of July each year since the foundation of CI5, the final cut of the new cohort was made and partners assigned, and also apparently since the foundation (or at least, a year after it) it was the tradition for the more senior CI5 agents to be treated at the pub courtesy of the incomers that weekend.

Ray had not been at all surprised when, arriving, still just a little damp from Jane’s shower (they’d had a lie in and then fallen asleep and then had another little lie in and time had slipped away), he’d seen that it was not a tradition Bodie kept. He didn’t seem to be big on bonding.

“What happened in training was Henderson’s own fault,” another third cohort guy – King, 3.9 – chipped in. “Henderson wasn’t up to it, didn’t meet the grade. Better have that highlighted by Bodie in an exercise than by some terrorist for real. No, Bodie’s good, maybe the best, and furthermore he’s lived it. Most of us have never left this country - the worst we’ve had to face is some back alley gang, with an ambulance on call and a hospital down the road. He’s been out there, in the jungle, surviving.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what you want after all,” Fields said sarcastically. “Someone as crackers as that on your back, _at_ your back, who can beat you in a fight. He was in Ireland, you know. What they call ‘peacekeeping’.”

“Hell, I didn’t say he wasn’t dangerous.” King rolled his eyes. “Dangerous and worse.”

“I can watch myself, come to that,” Ray answered, becoming obscurely irritated by the way the conversation was going. And then, because if airing it wasn’t going to help at least it wouldn’t make it any bloody worse. “I’m just worried he’ll do something and it’ll be both of us for the chop. I’ve had my eyes on this job for years, you know.”

“Kovac and Thomson refused to work with him over personal stuff,” Fields pointed out. “They said they just couldn’t stand him – he didn’t actually break any rules that I heard of, not on the job anyway.”

“When are we not on the job, this mob?” King asked, with a sigh.

“Well, Bodie’s found himself somewhere to be tonight,” Ray pointed out, and was annoyed with himself for how petulant it sounded. But it was reasonable, surely, to be frustrated that your new partner, quite aside from an unenviable reputation, clearly had no interest in building a decent working relationship?

“Bodie has a lot of ‘friends’ keeping him busy, I’ll give him that,” said Fields, with a leer. “I know some women are attracted to bad news, but _him_?”

“Well, you don’t _know_ they’re women,” King pointed out, with a little edge in his voice. “It’s not like we ever see him out.”

Fields slapped Ray on the shoulder, a quick, manful assault of support. “Yeah, well, good luck mate, that’s all I can say.” Ray, who had been listening carefully, struggled to interpret his tone, and whether his eagerness to get off the topic implied that King was entirely wrong or suspiciously accurate.

In the next minutes, King moved away, going to join a group at a table, and Fields claimed a call of nature.

So that was that, Ray thought as he finished his beer, now standing alone at the bar. Bodie was an unstable loner who wanted no-one and that nobody wanted. Rejected by his own cohort and with everyone else in CI5 ready to follow suit, and somehow, already, Ray tainted by association, someone people moved away from with the kind of efficient, impersonal caution anyone who lived long in this kind of game had soon learnt. The herd abandoning the lame impala and moving on.

“I’m not an impala,” Ray told Jane, quite seriously, when he arrived back at her flat later that night.

“You are drunk,” she countered and he had to bow to her logic, particularly as she was kind enough to let him in and collapse on her sofa, and even kiss his forehead goodnight.

He stuck by his point, though. This was not how he intended his life to go. Bodie wanted to alienate him? Fine. That would require Ray to give in to being alienated. It was obvious that no one could be forced to like someone, but no one could be forced into dislike, either, if they fought it.

And Ray was more than ready to fight.

\- - -

Bodie seemed to get off on winding people up, that was the worst of it. On being exactly what people expected of him, right down to the sulky retorts and the way he _played_ with knives during exercises. And everyone kept right on dancing to the beat of his drum.

Ray spent a couple of days simply observing, letting Bodie brush past him, letting the sarcastic asides go unchallenged, pleased to see that with every calm silence Bodie was looking at him slightly longer, slightly more directly, clearly unable to decide if he was a threat or a pushover.

Then, about a week into their time together, he went into action.

“What are you expecting? Some sort of show?” Bodie asked incredulously, as Ray sat down next to him at an otherwise deserted canteen table round which Bodie might as well have slung a cordon and a few hazard signs.

Ray shrugged. “You’re my partner now. I’m paid to suffer you. So I will. Simple enough. Pass the ketchup.”

For a moment, he really thought Bodie was going to lay him out flat. But Bodie sat back, shrugging and with affectedly gracious generosity:

“Yeah, alright, sit then.”

“I wasn’t asking permission.”

“Good thing you’re not the only one getting paid to suffer.” A challenge, now, in Bodie’s voice, a growl of dominance.

But it wasn’t going to be like that. Cowley had explained it to them same as everyone: partners, equals. Mutual respect, whether you wanted it or not.

“That reminds me, I was meaning to ask you about that, about pay.” Ray raised a forkful of steak-and-kidney pie to help him make his point, keeping it casual and hoping the racing of his heart didn’t show. Cowley presumably had reasonable expectation that Bodie wasn’t in the habit of killing colleagues for no reason, but just then Ray was very conscious of the number of sharp implements on the table.“Do you get paid more than me or what? Does it go up with seniority, year by year?”

“Does it hell!” Bodie snorted in disdain. “Don’t tell me – you’re waiting to hear about the pension. Nice little earner for you, eh?” And with that, he got up to leave.

“See you in the gym,” Ray called out.

Around the canteen, people were turning to look. Ray couldn’t spare them a glance.

Bodie turned on his heel, lip curling. _Like some great wounded bear,_ Ray thought then. _Like some creature that’s forgotten how to trust anything, even its own kind._

“Look, do you think we’re friends or something?”

“Or something. Like or not, you’re stuck with me too. Might as well start getting used to it.”

“Don’t give up, do you?”

Ray shook his head, and squeezed out more ketchup.

“Aren’t you afraid of me, then? Everyone else is. All your little playmates.”

Ray went for it – leapt up, quick as lightning, crowding Bodie onto the wall so fast he actually caught him off balance, holding his admittedly fairly blunt dinner knife to his throat, keeping him pinned primarily with the weight of his upper body and a textbook upper-arm grip he only wished Macklin could witness. They were nose to nose, now, and Bodie, having flexed his muscles, was visibly realising his disadvantage.

Ray tilted his head to one side. “Not so as you’d notice.”

For a long moment, they held each other’s gaze, Ray only vaguely aware of other people moving and talking around them, someone calling something out. He could feel Bodie’s body pressed against his own, was staring right into Bodie’s eyes, which were up close not as blank as they first appeared, certainly not intending to drop his own gaze first. It was unnervingly, terrifyingly intimate and yet somehow he felt that the violence had gone from the situation, that really, on either side it had only briefly been there.

“OK,” Bodie was saying, in a tone half-mocking, half something else - something confusing, unexpected. “OK. I like you.”

Ray let him up, caught between relief and an odd sense of flatness as they separated. Bodie gave him something that was almost a bow, with that odd mixture of courtly and camp and utter conviction that seemed his trademark, and started once more to walk away.

Then – and what decided him, Ray never knew – he turned, and came back to sit at Ray’s side, asking something about the meal, laughing at Ray’s answer, breaching another topic, settling in, and that was it, there, them, that was how it was going to be.

\- - -

The thing with Jane didn’t work out, but Ray could never remember afterwards if she’d been the one who’d caught him coming home with Mandy the ballerina, or the one who’d left him for an accountant, or the one who’d decided to move to Indonesia. He mostly remembered talking to her about Bodie.

\- - -

Nine years might seem like a long time – certainly the longest Ray had ever had a partner for - and yet also not very long at all.

Nine Christmases – for the first two, Ray never even wondered where Bodie was. As soon as he went off on his own holidays he tried to forget everything but the familiar rhythm; back to Derby for three days in his Mum’s spare room, constantly assailed by sugar-filled nieces and nephews awake at ungodly hours of the morning. The Queen’s Speech, roast duck, pudding, crackers, pine needles in your slippers and watching babies roll around blissfully in wrapping paper – it was all so obvious, so comfortable even in its annoyances, that he never thought someone else might not have it.

Their third winter together, they had to work over Christmas, some bastards deciding to take a senior MP hostage on the bloody 23rd of December and having the temerity to be very hard to find.

“Don’t they have homes to go to like everyone else?” Ray had grumbled, and Bodie had looked away, screwing the top back on a thermos with perhaps more vigour than necessary, and Ray had closed his mouth again, and connected the dots, and winced.

The fourth time it was looming upon them, Ray asked Bodie if he fancied a few drinks on the 22nd, the night before Ray was due to drive to Derby. But Bodie demurred – he was working again. In fact, Ray discovered later that day from one of the secretaries,  preparing for her own lone guard of manning telephones, Bodie always worked through the Christmas season, and made a tidy profit on charging for shift swaps to free up the men with families.

Back home, sitting on his Mum’s sofa, watching Richard Attenborough in his annual tunnel from the POW camp, Ray found his thoughts turning sometimes to Bodie back in the office, to ideas of confinement, of entrapment. Of loneliness.

After that year, however, and without really meaning to, Ray didn’t think about it anymore. Bodie’s ways were a bit strange, but Ray was used to them. And not having family was simply part of who Bodie was, and it wasn’t awkward or strange, just normal.

Ray got used to many things about Bodie, as the years passed. He got used to the way Bodie talked, and the way Bodie didn’t talk, particularly when he was really feeling something. He got used to the way Bodie behaved about death, especially if it had almost been Ray’s. He got used to the way Bodie dated girls for three weeks and then dropped them for no reason at all, often leaving them phoning Ray’s number to cry and ask for reasons he had no ability to give.

He got used to the way Bodie made him laugh, and the way Bodie could stop him from wanting to weep in despair. He got used to Bodie at his side, protecting him, and how Bodie really was, without doubt, the best in the mob. He got used to being the one person Bodie would let into his space, sometimes the only thing between him and the oblivion he could still seem to be chasing. Used to being Bodie’s one apparent half-way sane and healthy friendship.

He had become accustomed to Bodie. Possibly too accustomed. His wariness had fallen away, his suspicion silenced. He didn’t pay attention, as he’d used to, to how they interacted, or bother trying to interpret it.

He had stopped fearing that Bodie had any power to hurt him.

\- - -

Chapter One

\- - -

**_1984._ **

Only that morning, it had seemed set to be just another day off.

A bright, fresh spring Saturday – there had been barely a cloud in the sky as, promptly at half past eight, Ray had parked outside Bodie’s flat, ready for one of their extra-curricular jogging sessions. They had made a point of getting in extra training for months, carrying on naturally from the physical therapy Ray had been undertaking weekly following his injuries. Sometimes, on a rare free day, it felt like the most extreme masochism, but on that morning Ray had woken keen for it, a pleasant hum of energy running through him.

Bodie, by contrast, had been bleary-eyed and grumbling, only condescending after toast and a banana and strong builder’s tea to change into his tracksuit and set off down the road.

“There, now eat that,” Ray had said, having prepared the food whilst Bodie had been in the bathroom, smiling and then laughing at the sight of Bodie’s pouty, mardy face glaring back at him.

He had, it was true, arranged the slices of banana on the toast and jam in a smiley face, just as his Mum had done sometimes when Ray hadn’t wanted to go to school. But that didn’t excuse Bodie’s mood.

“Eat it!” Ray insisted, slapping him gently round the head, still laughing despite himself, and Bodie narrowed his eyes at him and stuffed the whole slice in his mouth at once, and Ray had slid down in the other chair, doing something he could only admit was giggling.

As they built up to a steady running speed along the pavement, Ray smiled again at the memory.

He’d only been to this flat of Bodie’s once before – it was barely a week since Bodie had moved in one of the routine security shake-ups. Despite protestations from the agents about the commute, HQ seemed intent – apparently for budgetary reasons, though Ray suspected downright sadism - on sending them ever further from the centre of London. This meant finding new jogging routes, and earlier in the week they’d figured one out over lunch on Ray’s battered A-Z, passing through the gardens of Chiswick House, crunching the gravel in perfect synchrony as they passed the early-blooming rosebushes.

They didn’t talk much – they didn’t have the breath – but every now and again Ray would look across to Bodie, catch his eye, agree a choice of direction with a nod and a grunt, decide whether to lap the lake three or four times – it was comfortable, and the time passed quickly.

They were within sight of Bodie’s building when the rain struck, black clouds rolling overhead out of nowhere and bursting without preamble, drenching them rapidly. Putting on an extra sprint to shelter despite their tiredness, they were soon laughing and shoving each other up the stairs, to fall in through the front door and onto Bodie’s sofa, wet and cold and panting.

It was easy, natural and familiar, and perhaps, Ray thought later, that had been the whole danger of it. That they did not restrain themselves around each other, not any more.

Sitting there on the sofa, happy, breathless, Ray caught sight Bodie’s expression, which was a split second of unguarded, wide-eyed hunger. He did not know he reacted to it, exactly, but whatever emotion his face had shown in response lead Bodie to lean over, then and there, and kiss him.

Bodie’s lips were cold with the rain, but warming, warm against him. Ray could feel his own face flushing, feel the blood rising across his skin, the near-ache of a sudden blush, and still, overwhelming, extraordinary, Bodie’s mouth meeting his own, softer than he might have expected.

Sensation transfixed him. Shock, maybe.

_Bodie._

Finally, they broke apart, Bodie pulling back, and Ray was aware that he hadn’t moved - that he hadn’t done a single thing in either welcome or rejection.

Bodie was still breathing hard, not quite looking at him, and Ray felt a terrifying lack of ideas. What he should do, what he wanted to do, what Bodie wanted him to do – none of it was comprehensible, all too crazy, too impossible – the day had had a rhythm, a familiarity, and that was shattered now and he _didn’t understand_.

Fear prickled up his spine, adrenaline leaving his mouth dry and bitter where moments earlier...

Oh yes, he ought to be afraid.

They could not argue. That would be the worst thing possible. The panic that was now sweeping through Ray was focussed on that, first and foremost - on the horror that would be hurting each other.

He’d never enjoyed fighting with Bodie – the real fighting, that was, not the shoving, the teasing, the one-upmanship over girls that all, really, boiled down into an expression of affection blokes couldn’t put any other way. Disputes, real disputes, had always been unpleasant, but over the years had gone from that to genuinely painful, a knot forming in Ray’s stomach even when they when they play-acted at hating each other for some undercover assignment.

And this was the thing; he once would have thought, from how Bodie was when they met, that pissing him off to the point of no return would be pretty damn easy. That, say, stalking him and his girlfriend to their hotel room or trying to beat up his old mates or punching him in the fucking mouth over some girl would just about do it.

Or, come to that, that he’d never be able to forgive Bodie those things.

But despite everything here they still were, and if anything that made Ray more scared, because he didn’t _know_ , he didn’t have any estimate of Bodie’s limits and surely, sooner or later, he’d hit them?

And this... This today, this was not right, this was not in the script. Bodie was his partner, his friend – had somehow become his best friend, as obvious as family, and Ray couldn’t lose him over this.

They knew themselves, and their situation, knew it inside out and it worked. This... what Bodie had it done - it was change, and that was something they couldn’t risk.

And after all, when had either of them ever _not_ lost someone (usually either angrily, horribly or both) that they’d become... entangled with?

Taking a long breath, Ray spoke, as calmly as he could, aiming for lightness.

“So,” he said, “which one of us is going to say something first?”

Bodie’s face had been a shuttered blank,  only his eyes wary if you knew how to read him, and Ray, oh, Ray had thought himself an expert in that art until two minutes ago.

“Me, obviously,” Bodie said, and there was something lifting him now, the slightest curve of his mouth as Ray tried to steer the moment away from disaster.

Ray noticed with a peculiar sensation that Bodie’s lips were swollen and reddened.

They’d become warm. The kiss had made them warm and Ray knew how Bodie tasted, now.

Ray was aware again – for perhaps five minutes, he’d forgotten it entirely – of the cold water in his own hair and the way rivulets of rain were trailing down his neck, and of the deep chill where his tracksuit bottoms had soaked through. These were still, however, peripheral things. In his centre, in his core, he could only perceive heat. He moved his tongue in his dry mouth, swallowed, and tried to look away from Bodie’s mouth.

He’d felt like this before, staring down the barrel of a gun; an awareness of the present moment so intense that it almost hurt, as if the air around had thickened with the pressure of concentration.  

“Fair enough,” he made himself say, because they had to move forward, this had to conclude, somehow. “But what are you going to say?”

Bodie was rubbing one hand with the other as if to warm it. Those hands had been holding him, Ray was sure, although he’d scarcely noticed at the time. There was an echo of touch on his upper back, a sense of pressure that was not entirely uncomfortable.

He would never have expected to be disgusted by Bodie’s touch – it was _Bodie_. But it was ridiculous that he should think he had liked it.

This was not... them.

Bodie was looking up at him now, and Ray saw with a sinking dismay that he had affected that superior, supercilious air he often used when he wanted to mask his feelings. It was never a habit Ray liked in him, and just now it was infuriating, not least because, dammit, Bodie had started this, Bodie had served it up, Bodie could serve it out.

“Can’t you guess?” Bodie asked, all nonchalance, as if he was teasing some pick-up in a pub, as if this didn’t _matter_.

Ray snapped. “Frankly, mate, it’s moved a bit beyond the compass of my tiny mind.”

Abruptly, he stood up from the sofa, desperate to ease the sense of entrapment, the stifling awareness of Bodie’s physical closeness and mental distance. A tea-cloth on a hook in the kitchen area caught his eye, and he made for it, thinking of the way his hair was dripping on the leather of the sofa and the horrible likelihood of it leaving a permanent mark.

Behind him, he heard Bodie moving too, and stopped, still facing away, waiting.

“It never happened, alright?” he heard Bodie say, shortly, and by the time Ray had turned, had readied himself with all the reasons why that was the most stupid, childish solution he’d ever heard – didn’t Bodie care? Didn’t Bodie care at all about the partnership? About them? – Bodie was already away, across to the other side of the room and slamming the bathroom door behind him.

Within seconds, there came the sound of the shower switching on.

And there was no chance for Ray to say anything else he might have thought of.

But then perhaps it was easier and better not to speak. They’d swept away other conversations in their time, given each other the odd backslap and reciprocal pint-buying and left it at that and talked about football, because what did you say, anyway, to someone who had put their life on the line for you? Not just in the call of duty, either, but in situations that went way beyond anyone’s idea of the rules.

Ray hadn’t wanted to work with Bodie, once upon a time, but now – as the years passed and they both got older, collected their injuries and ran their risks - he could see the ending coming, not soon but possible, possible as it wouldn’t have seemed to younger men, and he dreaded it ending, any way at all.

And he couldn’t bear it to be broken now, too soon, over this.

Ray had been standing, staring at the closed bathroom door, clutching the tea-towel to his chest. He blinked, moving again, as from Bodie’s bedroom came the sound of a telephone ringing.

Glad to have something else to focus on, if only for a moment, he waited through a couple of rings, just listening to the reverberating jangle.

Then he realised, from the still-closed door, that Bodie wasn’t hearing it.

Before... well, before this morning, Ray would have just barged into the bathroom and told him, simple as that.

But, already, things weren’t easy any more.

Already things were slipping away.

Gritting his teeth, Ray made for the still-ringing phone himself. Given that Bodie had only just moved in, the call was most likely work, which might be very important. There would not have been time, even by Bodie’s standards, to give the number out to any girls in bars. Or to, Ray supposed, well, to... anyone not a girl who might be in a bar.

He didn’t think Bodie gave out details to anyone else.

He walked into the bedroom and picked up the receiver, barking in a brisk “Hello?” and waiting for the caller to identify themselves, his mind still more than half in another place.

“Hello,” a male voice answered – a posh, businesslike tone. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, Mr Bodie...”

“I’m not...” Ray began, but not quickly enough, his reactions slowed as his mind tried to focus.

“I’m one of the doctors at the James Cook Hospital in Teeside” the man continued, steam-rollering over the objection, “where I’m sorry to say your wife has just died.”

\- - -

Ray, holding the phone tightly to his ear, was aware of making the occasional vague assertive noise, probably indistinguishable from those of stunned grief, as he tried to make sense of what he was hearing.

Words were coming through the phone, words that did not make sense; ‘car crash last night’, ‘everything possible done for Jillian, of course’, ‘such a tragedy for you, I do understand’ and then a seemingly well-rehearsed mumble about ‘viewing the body if desired’ and collecting the death certificate, and finally the click of the phone being replaced the other end and silence, silence in which Ray was staring forward, seeing nothing, still holding the phone.

_Bodie’s wife?_

There had been, over the course of Bodie’s various relationships with girls, some that he had seemed closer to than others, but in Bodie’s world that usually seemed to translate to barely more than calling them the next morning.

And if one of them were special, were chosen, why on earth would she be living over a hundred miles away to the north?

Ray sat back on the bed, vaguely aware of the deeply impersonal surroundings of Bodie’s bedroom, where only that morning he had clowned about doing his best Regimental Sergeant Major impression.

He’d never really thought about what reason might be behind the fact that he’d grown, over the years, to always be hearty, always comical, around Bodie when in bed. Not to think too hard, or take in too much, or be too aware of how, like any bedroom, there was a slight but distinct scent of the occupant.

That was always about the only feature that distinguished Bodie’s bedroom from one in a show house. The flats came fully furnished, in a manner of speaking, and unlike Ray, Bodie never did anything to alter them or adjust to his own taste. This new room had inky blue walls, a single framed Turner print, two little bedside cupboards, a tall, ugly wooden wardrobe and a full-length mirror. The only hint of human habitation other than the indifferent attitude to clothes storage was the two books on one cupboard – Betjeman’s poems and _The Lady in the Water_.

Ray had always wondered if Bodie kept it that way because when he brought people to his flat, it was generally the bedroom they saw, and he wanted to give them as little personal information as possible.

And now, circling back to the main idea, the one from which, reeling from bruising impact, he had allowed his mind to wander away, he could see the truth: Bodie had hidden _everything_ from him.

Ray had always thought - when he thought about it at all - that Bodie’s secrets now were mere details, how many killed and where, more than great revelations. That first and foremost it was important to show Bodie that he respected his privacy and was not angling for gory anecdotes to share around the locker room.

And Ray had reached that conclusion because, of course, he’d thought he’d known more or less all of Bodie anyway. He’d really thought he’d known.

From across the flat, the sound of the running shower slowed, then ceased altogether.

Making himself stand up, Ray walked back to the living area, hands clenched at his sides.

He was in time to catch Bodie as he emerged, skin and hair slick with water, towel wrapped round his waist, looking up - clearly surprised, pleased even that Ray was still actually in the flat, an expression crossing his face that Ray couldn’t quite bear to try and interpret, because if things were bad before they were fucking breaking now.

Holding up his hand to kill any comment Bodie might have begun, he made himself speak:

“There was a phone call.”

\- - -

Chapter Two

\- - -

Bodie had crumpled down with the news, just like he’d been punched.

Ray, standing over him, found himself wishing he had been. And then bit that down, and took a deep breath through his nose and said “She meant a lot to you,” - a rote phrase for strangers, suspects, relatives, other people.

For Bodie, now.

Bodie didn’t seem to hear him. He was staring forward intensely – it was a look Ray recognised, the kind people had when they were not just sad but afraid, struggling to imagine coping without the one who had gone, conflicted with grief and guilt, the guilt because of how _angry_ they were with the person who’d died for leaving them. It was too familiar, the way Bodie was clenching his hands up to his mouth, channelling his tension into his fists, his bare arms flexing with the strain, but familiar from other people, not Bodie.

“Jillian, they said,” Ray continued, because he had to speak or he was going to yell, because if he asked some questions maybe he could keep the real ones locked away. “Was she the one you dated in ’79? I didn’t realise that you...”

Slowly, Bodie shook his head, and still the over-riding emotion that Ray could read from him was fear.

“Do you want me to call work, get you some leave? You’ll want to go north, I suppose and...”

Ray stopped, a memory surfacing, a connection forming rapidly, uncomfortably.

The North. That time in the north. That had been a moment which Ray in the last ten months had held warmly, keeping in the edge of his mind, playing it over sometimes, a comfortable unfolding of thoughts.

Probably never to be comfortable again.

 “Were you visiting her, that time in Middlesbrough?” he asked.

“More or less.” Bodie looked up and held Ray’s gaze, as if challenging him to recall the rest of what had happened.

Ray was already there.

\- - -

**_1983._ **

It had been whilst Ray was recovering from being shot through the chest, off active duty and itching for something to do, dropping round to the CI5 office on the slightest pretext to try and make himself useful, and that particular evening having the excuse of filling in some paperwork about his sick pay. At about half past five, as he was playfully trying to get one of the secretaries to come out for a drink, a message had come over the radio, a tinny burst that had made his skin cold: _Attention Section 1: Agent 3.7 reports involved in three car pile-up near Middlesbrough. Treated at hospital there. Reports himself stable but staying overnight.  Requests to be reconsidered re: drugs siege tomorrow._

Ray had known he felt things more deeply, since his shooting. He knew that, hated it, and yet thought it was stupid to pretend to himself he was less nervous than he’d become. Wasn’t it permissible, as you grew older, to have a heightened sense of your own fragility?

More to the point – of other people’s?

It wasn’t, after all, as if he’d had anything better to do with his evening. Becky hadn’t probably been going to be persuaded about that drink anyway.

So he’d walked out of the office then and there, and made a rapid journey to Kings Cross station, to haul himself onto the next train. Then followed three agonising hours of staring out of the window – he’d not even thought to stop and buy a paper – watching the passing towns and fields as they grew dim and then dimmer in the gathering gloaming, his wounded shoulder unhappy with the cramped position but his mind unable to settle till he’d seen Bodie himself. There were several stations to pass through along the journey, and there’d been platforms of greetings and partings, embraces and tears and he’d felt very tired and very much alone.

Having finally reached the A&E department at the city’s hospital, no one there had been able to find Bodie. He’d had his hopes raised briefly as a casualty nurse pulled out an index card from a drawer, but it had only been the same surname, and from the wrong day.

“I’m sorry,” she said in the end, shrugging, looking over his shoulder at the queue he was keeping her from, “we’ve not got your Mr Bodie, I don’t think.”

The fear had been there then, clawing through him alongside the aching scars. He’d blinked, licked his lips, and told himself it was disorganisation - ridiculous, horrendous, scandalous disorganisation, the mess of the NHS. So much easier to be angry than afraid, but sometimes they seemed like the same thing.

Rapidly, without another word to the staff, he’d begun searching the building in the sorts of places he knew Bodie favoured when he was tired and hurting.

Of course, Bodie might have been lying – even then, as he searched and panicked, the thought occurred to him – Bodie might have found himself some quiet entertainment for the weekend and made up the Middlesbrough accident thing entirely, but that left Ray being not only alone but pathetic, having hared up the country, and he’d couldn’t allow that idea, not yet.

And in any case, eventually, the staff changing rooms near to the operating theatres had yielded success. Pushing violently through the heavy swing doors separating the male changing room from the surgical corridor, Ray had found Bodie in his sights, and it came with a relief that threatened to wind him as much as anything.

Ray could still remember how he’d looked, in the dim yellow light - Bodie, standing in the end cubicle of the showers, watching the water cascade over his own body, his head bent down as if in defeat. Billows of steam edging out the cold, three am air of a deserted hospital locker room. Bodie taking deep breaths, coughing – he was, Ray had seen, in that stage of exhaustion too profound to register much more detail.

There was an abrasion to his head, a purple bloom of bruise to his temple, and as he moved to lather himself in the bright orange surgical soap he was wincing with discomfort. But that was all. That was all.

Relief ended Ray’s surge of adrenaline and he sank, breathless, to the nearest bench.

Finally registering his presence, Bodie had turned sharply, every muscle tensing.

“What the fuck, Ray?” He looked startled, but the next thing he said was (quite levelly, as if there was nothing strange about the meeting): “It’s the middle of the night. You’re supposed to be getting your sleep.”

Ray frowned reflexively– Bodie’s protectiveness, since the shooting, had rankled.

“What the fuck were you doing driving?” he countered. “You were on a stake-out for forty-eight hours straight, you’ve got an op tomorrow by all accounts and you thought, what, you’d just jaunt up the M1 and check it was still there?”

And then, without really thinking about why, he had risen from the bench, had started walking. Right up to the cubicles. Closer and closer, staring at Bodie, whose answering gaze gave him no reason to stop.

And he’d walked right into the shower, right under the water, right up to where Bodie was standing, naked and hurting.

Ray was tired too, exhausted, had pushed himself too far if he was honest with himself, and Bodie was clearly, for whatever reason, just about at the end of his tether. As Ray had reached out, touching the bruise on Bodie’s head with the tips of his fingers, checking, testing, Bodie had stepped slightly closer and they had been not quite hugging but something like it, resting against each other, and Ray could feel both of them relaxing, neither Bodie’s nakedness nor Ray’s clothes seeming incongruous at that moment.

“Hotel?” Ray had asked softly. Bodie just nodded, his head still ducked down, his breath warm against Ray’s neck.

They’d both stepped out, Ray first, and he’d stripped off his soaking clothes, one thin, wet layer after another, and they’d both dressed themselves in scrubs from a nearby pile, and then walked unquestioned back out through the surgical corridor and into the night.

“I’m so tired I think I’m still asleep,” Ray had commented. “I’m voting: B&B, sleep till ten, bacon for breakfast, then tell me about whatever didn’t actually kill you.”

“You didn’t need to come.” Bodie insisted, not very energetically.

“Yes, because I’ve got so much to do with my time.” Ray yawned widely as they crossed the car-park. “Bodie, what the fuck are you doing out here?”

Bodie had reached out, touching his arm, for no apparent reason besides that he wanted to, keeping a pace that Ray could match, and had changed the subject, asking about the physiotherapy. They’d barely made it to the hotel awake, had collapsed on the twin beds, and in the morning and forever after, Ray had never quite wanted to ask questions of himself or Bodie about that night. Including – and he’d known it, always known it was a mystery but he hadn’t wanted to ask - why Bodie had been driving north or who had hit him in the head, or why he was in the hospital at all.

\- - -

**_1984._ **

“So she was there?” Ray asked now. “This Jillian, your... wife?” The word sat in his mouth, heavy and bitter and that was stupid, fucking stupid. “She was in Middlesbrough? That was why you went there?”

“She was in Middlesbrough, that night,” Bodie murmured. And then, before Ray could clarify. “Jillian Clare was her maiden name and I did marry her. 1974, that was, before your time. We’d dated for two months.”

It was a lot of information, for Bodie, at a time like this. Not that there had ever been a time like this, really, because there had never, Bodie had never...

About two years earlier, Ray’s sister had had a lump removed from her breast, and the week they were waiting for the results, Ray had been climbing walls, and Bodie had – somehow – put up with him and distracted him and not left him too much alone. And there’d been the time his mother had the terrible pneumonia, before she stopped smoking, and when his nephew, as a baby, had got into a cupboard and tried to drink bleach. So yes, Ray had his moments, his crisis moments, but never Bodie. These things didn’t happen to Bodie.

Bodie looked sad, but not – not sad _enough_ , somehow. Ray couldn’t put his finger on it – something off, even amongst all the things he didn’t understand. And even through anger and hurt and confusion, once a policeman always a policeman and Ray had too many questions.

“So, when did you last see her?”

Bodie, still in his towel, still sitting on the sofa, rested his elbows on his knees and clenched his hands together, biting at the skin of his thumb. “In Middlesbrough, that day you came to get me,” he said, flatly. “Before that, I don’t know, maybe 1975 some time. May, probably.”

“But you were _married_ to her?”

“We stayed in touch, she...” Bodie took another breath. “I knew her when we were young. I was a few years older than her, so we didn’t exactly hang out together, but in passing, you know, at the...” After a pause, he opened his mouth again, but said nothing, struggling.

“Were you in love with her?”

As the words left his lips, Ray felt the echo of a kiss.

Bodie twisted round to look at him, his hair dripping all over the sofa, the cover of which now had to be just about ruined. Ray could smell the warmth of his skin, the creamy fragrance of his soap. Without meaning to, he took a step backwards.

“No. Never.” Bodie told him, half-defiantly, his old voice, the one that said _puzzle-me-out-or-break-your-brain-trying_. “I liked her, she was nice enough. I wanted her. I wanted to get her into bed, prove a point, to her or to me. Probably me. She held out longer than most.” He gave a dark laugh. “She was a good kid, you see. Not like me. Not like me at all.”

“But Bodie, why..?”

There was, of course, one reason, one very simple and very good reason why two people who had been together for even the briefest of periods might keep in touch. And even as Ray thought it he made himself look away and not think it, because if just now he had to realise another lie he was going to storm out and say something that would prevent him ever coming back again.

The silence dragged, and he knew he was a coward. Dammit if he didn’t want to march over to Bodie and just... he didn’t even know. Hurt him, probably, but maybe hug him, and clearly he was making his way through all the confusion just fine.

“Her parents died a while back, and she didn’t have much other family,” he heard Bodie saying, after a while. “But even before they went, they wouldn’t see her or talk to her or help her even though...” He took a deep breath. “All because of me, because of what I did.”

Ray waited to see if more was forthcoming, but Bodie was staring into space again and after a while Ray automatically went to make them some lunch, with everything still looking the same, just a normal day off, and the whole world tipped over beneath him, whether he understood the reason for it or not.

\- - -

“Let me come with you,” Ray said, and closed his eyes for a moment, because until he said it he still wasn’t sure if he was going to.

Bodie gaped across the table at him. He’d got into some jeans but was still topless – maybe the effort of choosing clothes was beyond him.

And indeed, for all the many and various hells Ray had watched him go through, for all the Marikkas and biker gangs and restaurant bombs, Ray had never seen Bodie look this... beaten.

“None of your business, is it?”

A lot of people, Ray thought, would describe Bodie as a rude, confrontational, aggressive man. And in a lot of senses they were pretty much right.

But Bodie was most likely to behave like this when he was scared. When he was really scared. If Bodie wanted to be hurtful, if that was his primary goal, he’d be calm and surgically precise about it. Ray knew that well enough.

So Ray shrugged, affecting casual logic, as if his throat wasn’t almost sore with tension, as if it was easy to be sensitive and not at all difficult not to shake him.

“Well, look, if you’re requesting leave I might as well too. Don’t really fancy hanging round teaching a bunch of Cowley’s fresh lambkins which end of the gun does the death bit.”

“But you don’t even know what the hell’s going on, you don’t – before, you...” Bodie trailed off, finally lowering his gaze.

_You don’t want me_ , he might as well have said.

“I’ve followed you into worse,” Ray pointed out, which was probably at least half-true, letting his fingers rest on the table-top; it made him look a bit like he was reaching out his hand.

“Just like that, you’ll come with me?”

Ray shrugged. “Of course. Look, I’ll go and pack, sort out the leave for both of us, see you back here in an hour. And don’t even think about slipping town without me.”

Bodie was staring at him, apparently genuinely dumbfounded, and for a moment they were quite still, watching each other. Ray was running on nerves now, on too much emotion changing too quickly, and he’d barely touched his own cheese sandwich. On this he could blame the fact that he found that he was reaching out, squeezing Bodie’s arm, brief but firm.

 “Ray,” Bodie said, his voice low and tight. “I’ve got to go right now. Today. And there’s stuff I haven’t told you, you have to realise that, right?”

Ray raised his eyebrow, “There’s a lot of stuff you didn’t tell me.”

And then moving away, rising, because he didn’t want to be told, not yet, not just yet. “And so you’re going to explain to me, and show me, and I’m not going to have to sit alone in my flat wondering what the fuck you’re getting up to, OK?”

Bodie studied his face for a long moment, then nodded. He opened his mouth as if to say something else, but Ray shook his head – all the breaking words, they were still right on his lips, ready and furious – and turned and made a swift exit.

He ran down Bodie’s street and on through the rain to the nearest bus stop, not the right one, but it would take him somewhere, somewhere away, and as he sat back in the stink of fish suppers and cigarettes and tried to breathe, his heart just wouldn’t stop pounding.

\- - -

Marriage.

Wedlock. Locked down, tied up into someone else always and forever.

Ray supposed that the closest he’d ever come in his life had been Ann Holly.

And he would have married her, without a doubt, if things had worked out just a little differently, and for a period he’d spent a long time wishing that they had.

But then the years passed, and he went further and further down the path that had apparently otherwise been mapped for him, and looking back he was struck not so much by regret as wonder – what would his life have been like, if she’d stayed with him? Would he be in the same job, even in CI5? Would he still work with Bodie? Would he still know Bodie?

And now the next thought, the new one, the one he didn’t want to have: would Bodie have tried to kiss him, back then, if he’d really been going to go through with it with Ann?

If Bodie had wanted, back then... If Bodie... In some ways it made sense of some things, but Ray didn’t want to follow that trail of thought.

And after all, on the other hand, Bodie had told him when Ann had called. After the shooting (how much of his life, now, seemed to begin with the caveat ‘After the shooting’), when he’d been in hospital about two weeks and just about properly conscious at last, past the tide-line of the morphia-dreams.

“Ann phoned me,” Bodie had said, and it taken Ray a while to figure out who he was talking about.

He’d never fallen so hard, so fast for anyone as he had for her. Her effect on him was astonishing, the pull deep in his gut, the way he wanted her, the almost angry need to have her approve of him – a strange, scarcely pleasant kind of desire he’d never known before.

But when she’d gone, there’d been no emptiness left behind, no sense that he’d ever really had her in any meaningful way.

“Phoned _you_? Ann Holly?” Ray had been sitting up in bed, drinking a little water and doing chest physio to keep his lungs clear, leg exercises to keep the blood from pooling in his veins. _The operation is only half of it,_ the consultant had said, _more people die after the table than on it, and you’ve had a good try already, I don’t intend to miss a trick with you._ Ray found it morbidly elegant, that his body could wind up killing itself even as it healed.

Bodie’s daily visit had tended to be around exercises time, even though Ray insisted he didn’t need any prompting.

 But that afternoon Bodie had leant forward in the chair, watching the effect of his words carefully.

“I’m alright, Bodie, go on, tell me,” Ray prompted him, curious.

“It got in the paper, you being shot, apparently. Your neighbours, I think. Of course Cowley made sure it was described as a break-in gone wrong. But your name was mentioned – heroic young man etc etc – and she wanted to know that you were going to be OK.”

Ray waited.

Bodie frowned – he’d looked worried. “Nothing else, Ray. She just wanted to know that you were alright. She asked me not to tell you she’d called and I told her I’d do what I thought was best for you.”

Ray laughed. “You never liked her.” And, waving away Bodie’s protests. “No, you never did. Well, it’s always nice to be thought of.”

He’d laughed again at the look on Bodie’s face, which lead him into a choking fit and Bodie at his side, smoothing his back, which he almost entirely hated.

“I’m fine Bodie,” he said when he could, encompassing everything he could think of. “I’m fine, Bodie, really.” And he had been – he really hadn’t felt he was missing anything. He knew if he saw her, he’d want her, call it chemistry or whatever you liked, but he didn’t need her.

He’d told his mother to go back home to Derby, after the first few days – she had plenty to be getting on with and staying in London was costing her a fortune. His sister who lived near Oxford had offered to come down, but he’d gently put her off, promising a visit when he was recuperating.

Bodie had never said that he would come and see him every day, had never promised to be friends and family put together, had never sworn to chase him in and out of death and back again.

But he’d done it, and Ray realised afterwards that it hadn’t surprised him.

Bodie, though, had been married. And Bodie’s wife, Bodie’s _wife_ , had been left alone in Teeside and had died with no one but strangers around her.

Once more, Ray tried to stop himself thinking about it, or ideally about anything other than sorting out his sudden list of tasks for the weekend.

He called for the leave first, only to be told that they were both unequivocally required for an op on Monday afternoon, come hell or high water.

At that moment, he thought either of those might have been preferable.

\- - -

They had been driving north for quite a while before Ray worked his courage up, all the conversation passing between them till that point about maps and junctions, the silence filled with the swish of the windscreen wipers and the relentless drum of rain on the car roof, the air heavy with the scent of wet tarmac, acid and astringent.

“Thank you,” Ray said, choosing no particular moment, but aware of the words, waiting to be said, easier than others.

“For what?” Bodie was watching the road, frowning at intervals, mired in his own thoughts.

And perhaps that was what had made Ray speak, a wish to drag Bodie back to him, to this car where nothing awful was just presently happening.

At least, he hoped not.

“Thank you for not leaving without me. I was half expecting to find you fled for the hills when I came back to the flat.”

Bodie raised an eyebrow. “Don’t thank me yet.” But he reached out and switched on the car radio, tuning it into some arts programme that Ray gave half his attention to as he reverted to staring out of the window at the other cars, which they were rapidly passing as Bodie doggedly ignored the speed limit, the vehicles all rising out of the haze of white spray from the road surface.

In a surge of memory, Ray felt Bodie’s lips, cold and rain-tasting, press to his own. He closed his eyes quickly, trying to block it out.

The radio segued into the news, and once it got to the sporting headlines, Bodie switched it off.

Ray rested his chin in his hand. He’d known about Bodie and men. It had been a revelation Bodie had made purposefully, one random day in 1979 – during the Iran hostage crisis, Ray remembered, they’d been arguing about it, or something. And Bodie had somehow got it round to telling him, in his own unique way, saying it carefully, distinctly, and clearly waiting for Ray’s response.

It had been, Ray had seen later, part of the process of moving in Bodie’s life from ‘work’ to ‘friend’ – with all and everyone at work, Bodie hid any potential vulnerabilities with practised care.

At the time, Ray had been stunned. He’d managed to express something equating to the idea that it didn’t bother him. That had been a lie. It had bothered him tremendously, though not in the way Bodie probably feared.

That Bodie could be, well, Bodie, and also _that_? That was confounding to pretty much everything Ray had ever known.

They’d never mentioned it explicitly again. Bodie never picked up men when he was out with Ray, and he seemed genuinely keen on women too. Ray had been able to almost stop believing it, to accept and ignore it simultaneously. And at the same time, perhaps, to stop expecting queer men to announce themselves with the wave of a pink silk scarf.

Bodie had told him _that_ , but not that he was married.

Ray had, now, to ask the question. The silence demanded it. Bodie would have to know he’d thought of it, and even if Bodie didn’t seem to have any appetite to tell him that wouldn’t make it less the case when they got there.

They were not haring north just for a dead woman to whom it would never matter when they arrived. They both knew it. Not having spoken it aloud was an insult to both of them, in the end.

At a service stop where they got out for comfort break, with kids running about screaming, Ray rallied himself, and as they stood leaning against the bonnet drinking coffee from the thermos – _their_ thermos, Ray couldn’t even remember which of them had originally bought it - arms across their chests, staring forwards, he spoke.

“Bodie, have you got a child running about up North?”

Bodie froze. He looked down at his mug and licked his lips, and Ray felt a shiver of revulsion, because he’d said it, he’d bloody been the one to say it and Bodie didn’t even have the balls to...

“I wouldn’t have put it precisely like that,” Bodie said, in a voice that was perfectly expressionless. And then, taking another sip, his face blank, almost threatening. “You’ll see.”

Ray put down his sandwich uneaten – the bread seemed like cardboard in his mouth, the coffee bitter and sickening – and didn’t say anything more.

So his stomach was sore and grumbling, his brain fuzzy with staring at tarmac, by the time they finally arrived, in the late afternoon, at the place there might be answers - the outskirts of Stockton-on-Tees.

 

\- - -

Chapter Three

\- - -

Having driven for some minutes through the town, Bodie parked up in a street of small brick semis, narrowly avoiding the pack of children running about in the road.

It seemed to have rained in Stockton as well as everywhere to the south; the pavements and front gardens with a wet, bedraggled look, more than one front fence rotting and pulpy under peeling paint.

As the noise of the car engine rumbled away to nothing, Bodie stayed staring forward for a moment, gripping the wheel, then swallowed, took a deep breath and released his seat-belt, pushing open the door and letting in a swift rush of cold, fresh air and the scent of wet stone.

“Number twenty-five,” he said.

Getting out in turn, Ray followed him, his chest tight with nerves he could scarcely explain on his own account. It was Bodie’s fear that was communicating itself to him – not the first time it’d happened, but he’d never before been so acutely aware of it. On previous occasions, there had tended to be distractions such as bullets.

This, this thing now, had nothing to do with work, with anything. No logical connection to Ray at all. There was no good reason for Ray to be here, other than that he had asked and Bodie had accepted, and maybe that was a reason too big to even think about.

As they approached number twenty-five, a woman came out of twenty-three, the house with which it shared a wall. She was small in stature, her hair tied up in curlers and a scarf, smoking a cigarette. Her expression was less than welcoming.

“One of you William Bodie?” she asked, and at Bodie’s quick nod. “Right, well, do you want to see him first or the house?”

Bodie blinked, but held her gaze. “You looking after him? Neighbour, are you?”

She nodded, tapping out her ash with a finger and pursing her lips as if she smelt something she disliked. “My name’s Madge. And I am. Was minding him for Jill last night and he’s still with us – never came home, she didn’t. Never will again.”

The aggressiveness of her tone was unpleasant, but Ray wondered if Bodie too could see that she’d been crying.

He certainly answered with more restraint than Ray might have thought him capable of.

“I’ll see him first, please,” Bodie said, through gritted teeth.

“Suit yourself,” Madge shot back, and, turning on her heel, went to her door. Ray was expecting her to call a summons, to get whoever it was out onto the pavement. But Bodie was simply following her into twenty-three, and, frowning, Ray came after, confused and doing rapid calculations of age in his head.

This confusion persisted as they made their way into the house,  Madge leading them by sharp left turn from the small hallway to her front room, which gave an instant impression of having too much inside it – sofas, pillows, cushions, mattresses – and then, in the midst of it all, Ray saw the boy, and he began to understand.

Fitting the time that Bodie and Jillian had dated, the boy could be believed to be around nine years old - he was just about big enough - but if Ray hadn’t known the dates, he would have thought him younger. He was lying down on a mattress on the floor, in a kind of nest of cushions, and as they came in his head turned a little, his eyes darting about, but he did not seem able to lift himself up. His hands were both curled up to his torso, stiff and his legs were straight and immobile. He was dressed, ludicrously, in a woman’s red silk pyjamas.

“Ain’t had time for more washing, not with six in the house as it is,” Madge muttered.

Bodie had one arm crossed over his chest, the other to his mouth, both forming a barrier in front of him. “Ray,” he said, speaking through his fingers. “This is my son, Ben.”

Ray, a thousand questions running through him, seized on the startlingly obvious: “You never said.”

It seemed horribly important, right then, that Bodie had not. That this had been a part of his life for nine years, for as long as Ray had known him and yet he hadn’t...

“All this time?” Ray said softly, and what was he even asking?

“Why would he have told you, pet?” Madge chipped in, clearly not about to miss an opportunity to put Bodie down. “Not as if he ever bothered himself to come visiting. Never seen hide nor hair of him round here, have we?”

The boy made a grunting noise, a harsh sort of wail that Ray saw made Bodie flinch, and Madge sniffed, ushering them back through the door and closing it behind her before she spoke.

“He misses her, poor wee bairn. They were never apart more than an few hours – he’s used to me for the one evening, and her coming to get him home for bed - she never stayed out the night, never. Been crying for her all morning, he has.”

“Yeah, well, much good it’ll do him,” Bodie stopped himself, and took a deep breath. “Thank you for watching him,” he added, tightly.

She raised an eyebrow, unimpressed.

“We’ll go and look at the house now,” Bodie continued. Simple, blank words, precise and stripped of everything he had to be feeling – it was frightening, Ray thought, how he could do that, how he could shut himself down, until you almost stopped believing the humanity was there at all.

“Suit yourself – it seems you do anyway,” she retorted, folding her arms. “Key’s under the mat.”

Ray wondered if Bodie would make another attempt to approach his son, but he marched straight back out and down the path.Behind them, Ray was relieved to hear the sound of Madge opening the door again, and making some kind of soothing noise, as if she might be comforting the boy who Ray assumed had no idea just what he had lost.

\- - -

Jillian Bodie’s house was, like the rest of the street, a stingy brick affair with every indication of bad post-war planning. From the small, dark hallway, the living room came first and had, like Madge’s, been filled with cushions, which surrounded a double mattress in the centre of the floor, also liberally decorated with soft toys. The room held a wardrobe, clothes rail, ironing board and television, as well as an electric record player and some sort of wheelchair folded up at the back.

_What the fuck, Bodie?_ Ray yelled, except he didn’t - he whispered it, mouthed it, swallowed it down, stamped it into the carpet and turned and said “I suppose she had to sleep alongside him,” and gestured at the room.

Bodie murmured, looking around himself. He seemed wary of actually touching anything.

Someone would have to, though, Ray thought. Someone would have to sift through this stuff.

Through absolutely everything that Jillian Bodie had left behind.

And why in the hell was that his problem to worry about? Why, when Bodie had clearly decided to think about _that_ later, should he have it preying on Ray’s thoughts?

In an attempt to clear his mind, Ray tried to take in the details of where he was standing. The living room, despite a certain messiness such as anywhere generally has for unexpected visitors – things scattered, old magazines left in piles, a few used mugs on the table – was bright and cheerful. Numerous pictures were hanging on the walls, mostly prints of horses, or collages of photographs from magazines, and more pictures had been arranged on strings to dangle over the room like carnival flags, creating a bright mosaic of colour. The fireplace had been boxed off, but the mantle remained, and on it were photos in wooden frames, a few of Ben alone, one of Ben with a pretty young woman who had to be Jillian, one of her with him as a baby – and he looked normal, more or less, wrapped in a blanket - and an old black-and-white wedding portrait with a stiff-backed couple.

No sign of Bodie.

Staring at the photos, as he had felt too uncomfortable to stare at the boy, Ray began to see the resemblance between father and son. The dark eyes, something in the brow.

He had never really thought about Bodie as a small child. There was little context for doing so. Bodie had never talked about where he grown up or what it had been like, just the implication, here and there, that he’d left for the navy at fourteen with little regret, and the fact that he never seemed to contact his family further evidence it hadn’t all been cake and roses.

Ray hadn’t wanted to be intrusive, hadn’t wanted to seem like another gawping spectator at Bodie’s psyche and so, he realised, he’d almost grown to think of Bodie as having sprung fully formed as a teenager, with nothing moulding him before.

Ben, though, was a reminder of the truth.

A truth which Jillian had apparently known, if she’d been Bodie’s acquaintance from childhood. She might, perhaps, even before the child, have been more closely connected to Bodie than anyone else.

But she too, now, was gone.

Ray leant on the mantelpiece and rested his head in his hand.

He could leave right now. He could get out, get the car for heaven’s sake, they were both insured to drive each other’s, make a mad dash down the M1 and find twenty colleagues who’d say he’d only done what was sensible, what they’d been urging him towards since the start, i.e. not get drawn into the evolving disaster that was Bodie’s whole existence.

Speaking of which... Looking up, he realised that Bodie had left the living room to explore further.

With a sigh in the direction of the power of the inevitable, Ray followed him.

At the back of Jillian’s house was a tiny kitchen, with dirty pans soaking in the sink, which was in dire need of new grouting, but otherwise cleaner than Bodie’s generally was when Ray hadn’t recently visited. The fridge was full of little containers of what seemed to be pureed food, and the usual rounds of milk, bread, veg and marge, receipts stuck onto the front with magnets, a list being built up with ‘peaches’ circled three times in red. Another magnet held down a utility bill with an angry red number in bold at the bottom.

Over the sink, a wide window gave a view of a bleak concrete yard, ringed with walls topped in broken glass, traversed by a washing line full of blouses, all of them dripping in the rain that had begun once again to fall.

Without really thinking about it, Ray pushed open the back door and went to take them down. There was a plastic hamper near the door, and a peg bag made in the shape of a Victorian woman with a full skirt. Once, he’d had to do this sort of thing for his mother to get his pocket money.

Ben wouldn’t have been able to help out that way – the thought hit him from nowhere, a clash of familiar and alien.

“What are you going to do with that lot then?” Bodie asked.

Ray, coming back in, the full hamper heavy in his hands, realised he had no idea. He put it on the table, and pushed it to one side.

Bodie was hugging his arms round himself again, his face bleak.

But Bodie had no right to look sad, Ray reminded himself, no right to look...

_What the fuck, Bodie?_

And they were going to have to eat, later, Ray found himself thinking. On plenty of jobs, food had been hard to find, far worse than simply being some unfamiliar house with a well-stocked fridge, but this was different. It was amazing how detached you could believe yourself to have become from death, in a profession where you saw it every day, when it became routine, expected.

This was quite different.

Upstairs, they found a bathroom with tights hanging over the bath, which was full of stacked plastic bowls. Ray puzzled over them until he started thinking about the realities of caring for a boy of Ben’s size and the bathroom being upstairs – probably Jillian had had to do it all using bowls. 

There were also two other small rooms, the first had no furniture at all, just a sewing machine and other assorted junk, the second a wide double bed from which the mattress downstairs had presumably come, made up all the same with blankets and sheets. The walls were painted white and there were no pictures, just a wardrobe with her clothes and the usual hatbox full of personal  documents – TV Licence, Council Tax, Provisional Driving Licence – the strings of numbers that legitimized an existence. Looking deeper, Ray found Ben’s birth certificate and under it a certificate of Christening. He wondered whether to show it to Bodie.

“We need to get it all put away,” Bodie was saying. Ray looked round and saw him standing, hands on hips, surveying the room. “I suppose everything can be sold to somebody, though I doubt we’ll get beyond the rag trade for most of it.”

Ray, sitting on the bed, stared at him.

Bodie walked closer, meeting his eyes. “She had a will, she was organised that way. I’m the executor. Everything goes to Ben. But he doesn’t need an ironing board does he? So we need to make it into money, and then at least, maybe...” he tailed off, blinking. “I know this place wasn’t furnished when she got it from the council, so just about everything bar the taps can go on for something.” He hissed through his teeth. “Was hoping there’d be more though, or at least something in decent nick you’d get proper money for.”

Ray stared.

“And before you ask, Madge is quite right,” Bodie turned and met his gaze, face cold. “I’ve never been here before. Your typical absent father, bang to rights.”

“Dunno about that,” Ray said slowly. He had a list longer than he could count of reasons why he should be cross with Bodie, he didn’t need to find ones he didn’t really believe were there. “I’ve known a few, not much like you, mate. Depends if you were asked or not, doesn’t it?”

Bodie blinked, and for a moment Ray thought he would get something at last, some blast of real feeling.

“Go to the top of the class,” Bodie said, mocking. “She didn’t want me. Not in her life, not in his. Can’t say I blame her.” His voice lowered, he looked around, as if in search of something. “I got her into this mess, after all.”

“You weren’t to know what would happen.” It sounded stupid, somehow.

“Nothing should have happened at all!”

It made sense that if Bodie was going to express something it would be anger,  probably that was what felt safest – this was the man, after all, who’d been the teenager who preferred foreign wars to his home life.

“I told you, Doyle, it was a heck of an effort to get her past her ‘not until marriage’ thing but me, being a fucking idiot, I thought it was a fun challenge. Thought she needed loosening up. I was trying to prove a point – to myself, not to her. And she liked it, she bloody well did like it, and after we’d been together two weeks, and I’d got her to do just about everything,  that was when I realised that when I’d asked her if she was on the Pill and she’d said yes, she’d only just gone to the doctor and got it the day we... It takes a while to kick in, you know. Or do you know? She didn’t.” He gave a short, hard laugh. “Too late by then.”

He sank onto the bed, a foot or so from where Ray still sat, scared to move in case he shocked Bodie from this fit of confession. “She was going to give the baby up for adoption, that’s what she told me, anyway. But then Ben came along and he’s... well, you saw how he is. She said that if she gave him away he’d been in an institution all his life, that no one would want him. So she left her job – she’d come to London, you know, dream of the bright lights, started working as a secretary or something - left all her life behind. Her family didn’t want to know a damn thing. And.... this.” He waved a hand at their surroundings. “This is what she got from her life, thanks to me. And now it’s over.”

“OK,” Ray folded his arms, taking one long, deep breath. “And when during all of that, exactly, did you squeeze in the wedding?”

“After she decided she was definitely keeping him.” Bodie was still breathing hard – Ray was amazed that he’d answered the question rather than lashing out. “Well, who else needed my ‘widows and orphans’ pension? It was just a document, I signed it, I signed the marriage certificate, and it made her happier that he was legitimate, I don’t know...” he shrugged. “That all still mattered to her, despite everything.”

“I see she had him Christened,” Ray offered now, holding the certificate out. “So she was religious? Is that what you’re telling me? Was that what...?  Was that the challenge?”

It hurt, prodding deeper hurt, but then Ray was the guy who’d pressed over all his gunshot scars every single day until they fully scabbed over, checking they were still there.

Bodie stood up, shaking his head. _No more_. “We need to get this stuff packed up. Get something underway for the funeral – the hospital gave me some numbers when I called them back – and then we can get the hell out of here, since they’re so desperate to have us back at work on Monday.”

“We staying here tonight, then?” Ray made himself ask, swallowing over the pain in his throat, the rage that was so strong and so lacking in any focus that he was almost more angry with himself than anyone, because he felt, in the end, like a bloody fucking fool.

“Best option really,” Bodie replied, and oh, you would have thought his voice was calm and cool, if you didn’t know him.

“OK, well, do you want in here or in the spare room? There’s enough cushions for a bed there, I reckon.”

“Not in here,” Bodie answered, apparently unable to control a shiver. Ray fought hard and suppressed the impulse, again – it was becoming rather a habit – to go over and try and touch him.

Punch him, maybe, but still.

\- - -

It had been late in the day when they arrived and now evening was drawing in. Ray insisted that they eat something before beginning the sorting, even though he still felt nauseous and was scarcely hungry himself. The fridge yielded the wherewithal for cheese and tomato sandwiches, which they accompanied with tap-water and strong tea.

They ate together in the kitchen, on two hard chairs around a small, low formica-topped table, chipped all round the edge, listening to the rain beat against the windows. It was getting colder, and Ray hugged his tea to his hands gladly - the gloom of the house, of the day, of past miseries, pressed in with a bone-deep chill like sea-fog.

There was, Ray noticed, a palm cross stuck into the window-frame.

Jillian had been religious. Jillian’s family had disowned her. Jillian and Bodie had known each other as children. Bodie might not think he was remembering this stuff but he was, as surely as if he had his old police notebook still in his front pocket.

Bodie would tell you in two seconds, whether you asked him or not, that he didn’t believe in God.

But once, during the hospital days post-Mai Li, Ray had woken to find Bodie at his bedside, hands clasped and head down.

“You praying?” Ray had asked, teasing, surprised.  Morphine made the world gently amusing, everything soft and possible, with nothing whatsoever to worry about.

Bodie had started up like he’d been hit, actually blushing.

“Why not ask for what you need?” he’d said, defensive, moving back – Ray hadn’t wanted him to move back, had liked him there, head near Ray’s hand, touchable (morphine made things so simple). But Bodie had moved away, miles away across the linoleum, and folded his arms.

“You’d get it,” Bodie had said then. “Not for me, but for you. You’d deserve it. Side of the angels.”

Ray had frowned – the cloud of sleep was dragging him down again. “Better safe than sorry,” he mumbled, because it seemed like it might make sense.

“She told me prayer was all we had,” Bodie said then, his voice soft, scarcely as if he meant to be heard. “I see what she meant. If you have to do something, and there’s nothing you can do, you can...”

“You should get some rest, that’s what you should do,” Ray told him.

“Soon,” Bodie answered, and sat back again, watching, and Ray had fallen away and under, into the sweet blackness, vaguely aware of the pleasant sensation of Bodie’s hand reaching out to take his own.

Now, Ray studied him from across the table, looking at Bodie sitting arms crossed, leaning away from him, his tea forgotten, watching the rain beat against the windows, and their reflection in the dark glass - intruders, two men ill at ease in a shared house, looking wrong with the backdrop, with each other, miscast and mismatched and struggling.

\- - -

It was not pleasant work, dismantling someone else’s life, and if Ray was finding it hard, Bodie was quietly imploding into himself.

Every time Ray caught sight of Bodie’s face he was relieved again that he’d insisted on coming, because who in the bloody hell knew how Bodie might have tried to cope with this otherwise.

They began, on Ray’s suggestion, in the master bedroom, which had obviously been little more than a walk-in wardrobe, and which he therefore hoped would be least unsettling to be in. Taking dresses, slacks and t-shirts from their hangers and folding them up was an unfamiliar task, but pretty easy to make into a mechanical routine.

Finally, at well past midnight, with most of the cupboards cleared, Ray put his last box in the hallway. His eyes were sore and stiff with the desperation for sleep, and he hoped that sheer exhaustion would over-ride the several hundred legitimate serious worries that might keep him awake if he let himself think about them for even a second.

Lugging his own suitcase upstairs, he unpacked a few bits and pieces before using the bathroom, clearing the tights from over the bath and chucking them in with the blouses in the tub downstairs.

Then, sighing, he returned to them, picked them up and took them to the spare room where he assembled a clothes horses and hung them up properly, ignoring comments from Bodie who was constructing a bed of cushions and a sleeping bag on the floor.

Having showered, Ray changed into pyjama bottoms and a sweater – it was getting even colder in the house and he hadn’t liked to suggest turning on the heating  - and made his way to the master bedroom.

Although it was still a shambles, he was aware again of the emptiness in it which he knew had repelled Bodie earlier. This was the bedroom of a woman who had not used it as a bedroom, who could not, who had surrendered private space and personal life for caring for her son.

Ray wished, with a pang of regret that surprised him in its intensity, that he could have met Jillian.

His thoughts went to Ben, still in Madge’s front room – would Madge stay with him all night? They’d never even bothered to thank her for that.

Was Ben still waiting for his mother to come back? Neither Madge nor Bodie had seemed to think he would understand an explanation. Maybe he wouldn’t.

Ray pressed his fingers to his eyes, trying to stem the first bloom of a headache. This was not his business and just now he was not going to worry about it.

The other problems with the room, which didn’t register until he tried to go to bed, were that there were no curtains at the window, allowing in both the street light’s orange glow and the cold, and that although the base of the bed remained, the removal of the mattress had left little comfort in it.

Lying back, shivering, Ray thought about Bodie in the next room, surrounded by all the things of Jillian’s life, probably cold as well, probably frightened, even if he’d never admit it, of what must come next, what had to come next, the subject neither of them had discussed.

And now Ray was thinking about it again.

He pushed back his blanket and stood up.

This might be a bad idea, one of his worst, one of his most dangerous, but he was too tired to care.

Certain things were... inevitable, were what you did, were like picking up laundry in the rain or boiling the kettle, the most basic machinery of life.

Ray opened the door and walked out into the corridor, then into the spare room.

Bodie was sitting up, resting against a wall, staring forward, and Ray walking in made him jump.

As he did see Ray, his expression softened. There was no teasing, no mask, not just now, and Ray could have kissed in him relief – not like... that, just, pulled him in and embraced him, like he might his family, just the reassurance of touch.

That morning, Bodie had kissed him – Ray couldn’t stifle the recollection. And not like family. It had been only that morning. And Ray had thought that was as bad as the day was going to get.

That was why it was so important right now that Ray didn’t touch him. If some semblance of normality was to survive the night, if everything wasn’t to crumble away between them, leaving him no way to help Bodie at all, this had to be professional.

Ray crossed the room and lifted Bodie’s blanket, squashing in next to him.

“Shut up, it’s cold,” Ray said quickly, and turned to lie on his side, facing away.

Eventually, he was aware of Bodie relaxing a little, and finally lying down under the cover next to him, but Ray stayed awake, waiting, until finally he heard Bodie’s breathing go slow and regular as he drifted off into sleep.

Ray was still thinking, and thinking, and more aware of Bodie, in several different ways, than he wanted to be. He stared up into the darkness, heard cats fighting, then boys, somewhere a man shouting, and then silence and then finally birds, because it was starting to get fuzzy-light, before he ran out of ways to be scared or was possibly overwhelmed by them, and closed his eyes.

\- - -

Chapter Four

\- - -

Ray came slowly awake, aware of gradual detail of a stiff neck and a cold arm, of the way the cushions he was lying on had moved as he slept, creating a furrow into which he was falling, of the scent of the drying washing, of the presence of Bodie – something common enough to be reassuring.

It was as he realised that he was cold because Bodie had hogged the blanket, that he was sleeping next to Bodie, and that in fact their legs were touching, that his emotions shifted. There was a peak, a rise, an intake of breath before he remembered, and then the anxiety ground back down and extinguished what had felt like a glow.

Carefully extricating himself, he padded bleary-eyed to the bathroom, and splashed his face with water. The bathroom was at the back of the house, overlooking the yard, or would be if the glass wasn’t frosted, and from the alley beyond he could hear shouts and calls as children were called back to breakfast or entreated to stay clean.

He’d grown up himself in a neighbourhood like this, a world where everyone knew everyone else’s business and why not? If you wanted to keep something private, it was surely not something you ought to be doing.

If in a place like that you had the misfortune – that was how he’d seen it – to be a slender, graceful, beautiful young boy you had to prove you weren’t a sissy pretty bloody quickly.

Violence wasn’t approved of, but it was what boys got up to, and even as he’d been carted back time and again to his Mum and Dad by the police, he’d been aware that they were relieved under their irritation. If Ray was giving out black eyes behind the bike sheds, well, that was the story you wanted the neighbours to know for why he was there at all.

After all, it had been fear of public opinion that had kept his parents together, even years after it was clear they didn’t suit, and only made each other unhappy. They’d stuck it out, and his mother had nursed his father through the final stages of lung cancer with impeccable diligence, and after the funeral she’d looked... younger. Lighter.

By that point, Ray had gone some way towards convincing her, and himself, that violence didn’t suit him and that, yes, real men could go to art school. But he’d liked both, that was the truth of it, the horror and the beauty, and when it came down to it, he was better at killing people than he’d ever managed to become at painting.

And so he’d turned round on the wheel again, and concluded that he wasn’t cut out for anything else. That he belonged (with Bodie, comfortingly, just like Bodie) in a different world, maybe one you could call elite, special. That domestic life - little houses and school-runs and familiar neighbourhoods were simply not something he’d ever have.

That he’d never have a decent marriage. That he’d never have children.

Jillian’s tooth-mug dropped out of his hand into the sink. It was plastic, but it smashed, splitting into hundreds of shards, razor sharp in his hand.

Ray looked down at the mess. There had to have been a crack in the mug, he thought, even though it looked OK, a fault line just waiting to break.

 It was too early in the morning to be thinking. He went back to his suitcase in the master bedroom, dressed, and went downstairs in search of the cornflakes he’d spotted the previous night.

This required the milk from the fridge - he only remembered as he went to look for it that they’d all but finished it the night before.  Holding the nearly-empty bottle in his hand, he looked for a while at the fridge shelves, and then without really letting himself pause to think, found himself in the next few minutes at Madge’s front door, carrying a plastic washing bowl stacked full of little containers of pureed food.

“Thought these might be useful to you,” he said when the door opened.

Madge frowned, flicking her cigarette ash at his feet. “Well, you care then, even if himself doesn’t.”

“Look, did she ever actually tell you he wouldn’t come?”

“Didn’t have to, did she? He was never here. Ain’t natural, never to want to see your own son, cripple or not.”

Ray proffered the bowl. “Here, have them.”

She raised an eyebrow and stood back. “You can come in and feed him since you’re here. I’ve got four of my own on my hands trying to murder each other before their Dad takes them swimming.”

“No, I don’t think....”

“Come in,” she insisted, with a mocking look that was easy enough to see as a challenge.

He allowed himself to be lead in.

From the kitchen came the sounds of children shouting and laughing, but closer to the front door, from the living room, it was drowned out by an unearthly groaning noise. Ray, gripping the bowl to his chest, realised he was actually scared.

Madge breezed in front of him and jabbed a finger at the floor. “Prop him up on the pillows, see, before you start, or he’ll choke. He’s got a chair of his own over there,” she gestured at the wall and by implication Jillian’s house, “but it’s a bugger to lift, even with me and Jill, it’s that heavy with levers and things, and not worth it for the one evening. So she showed me how to do it this way.” Her voice had trailed off as she spoke, the use of Jillian’s name making her quieter, slowing her movements.

Ray murmured something about fetching the chair for her afterwards.

She frowned. “Listen, love, he can’t stay here for good and ever, if that’s what you and your pal are thinking. Bless him, he’s a sweetheart and not his fault to be the way he is, but I’m stretched thinner than I can go already. And I’m only here on account of it’s the last weekend of the holidays and I’ve got time off from my boss. Normally Mrs Timpson across the road looks in for their breakfast and sets them off to school. Whereas he needs someone all day - all night too, really.”

Ray looked at Ben. He had stopped groaning and was holding himself almost still, very tense, his eyes still darting back and forth. Ray thought he looked like he was concentrating. Surely Madge wouldn’t speak like that unless she knew the boy couldn’t understand her? But then, Madge seemed likely to be blunt to anyone and everyone.

Ray knelt down. “Breakfast  now, eh?” he said brightly. Ben turned his head towards him. He was pale, dark rims near his eyes.

“My name’s Ray,” Ray ventured carefully, hoping the tone of his voice might be soothing if nothing else. “I’ve come to help you with breakfast. I haven’t had my food yet. It was going to be cornflakes. I’d rather have bacon, but if you eat bacon every morning you can’t run from the KGB like you ought to.” Gently,  as he spoke, he arranged Ben upright.

Madge, who had taken the food jars away to her kitchen, interrupted, bringing him one back warmed, and a spoon.

Ben remained quiet, the groans silenced. It was hard to tell what he was looking at, with the way his eyes moved, but Ray rather felt he was being regarded with suspicion.

Ray lifted the first spoonful to Ben’s mouth – it was some kind of rice pudding, he thought, and smelled pretty tasty, actually. He’d fed his sister’s babies in years past, and tried to use the same techniques she’d taught him for getting the majority of the food into the mouth rather than on the face. It seemed to work and Ben took several spoons with apparent eagerness.

After a few, though, he cried out again and started rocking, moving his head away, despite everything Ray could think of to calm him.

“I’m sorry, kid, I don’t know what you want,” Ray said, helplessly, getting up and, feeling like a coward, going to call Madge back for help.

She sniffed as she passed him, having clearly decided he was utterly useless, and went into the living room, armed with a damp cloth. “Let yourself out,” she called over her shoulder, and, sheepishly, he did.

It was a feminine thing, one that might be labelled distinctly ‘sissy’, Ray thought, to enjoy looking after children. But he wished he might have been able to comfort the boy better, or at least not get it so very wrong.

\- - -

It felt colder than before in Jillian’s house. As Ray closed the front door behind him, the handle pulled away from his grip, the door slamming back into the frame, and he realised that a draught was running through the hall. In the boxes piled over the floor, a few things had blown over from the top of various stacks, a lampshade rolling lazily over the carpet, tassels rippling.

The back door must be open. Ray went into the kitchen to investigate, only to stop as something crunched under his feet.

There were shards of white china on the floor, what looked liked the remnants of smashed plates, maybe three or four, the rest still stacked on the table by a full storage box.

Not as if they’d fallen, then. As if someone had taken them and...

The door was open indeed and beyond it, out in the back area, Bodie was leaning against the brick wall, drinking milk directly from what was presumably a newly-delivered bottle. His hand was bandaged round with a tea towel.

Ray stepped outside, and Bodie looked up at him sharply, surprised.

“Thought you’d gone,” he said, after a moment.

Ray frowned and shook his head. “No, I just...” He stopped, licking his lips. He hadn’t thought. Never stopped to wonder if Bodie would assume... “I took some of Ben’s food over to him at Madge’s. She wanted me to feed him – she’s up to her eyeballs – so I tried, and that took a while. Bit of a disaster though.”

He was rambling, and Bodie’s face was setting into stone.

“Right,” Bodie said, pushing himself up off the wall to stand straight. “Feeding him. Of course.”

“She just asked, I didn’t...” Ray swallowed. “You hurt yourself,” he continued.

“This? Not really,” Bodie took another swig of his milk. It went round his lips, leaving a tidemark of white. Pretty soon there wouldn’t be any left, Ray thought, and he still wouldn’t get his cornflakes and that, of all things, made him want to laugh, to just give up and say this was the most godawful horrible mess he could ever have imagined, except his imagination wouldn’t have taken him anywhere close to this.

It was chilly outside, despite the ever-climbing sun, the wind was still blowing strong, and more clouds were gathering in the sky.

“I was going to make some coffee now,” Ray said. “You want any?”

Bodie shrugged, not looking at him.

Ray turned to go inside, then swung back again. “He’s just there, you know. You could see him if you wanted to. Talk to him.”

Bodie’s head snapped up. “ _Talk_ to him?” His fists were clenched, and his expression should have been enough to make Ray stop, but then that was only what Bodie wanted.

Everyone else danced to the beat of Bodie’s drum. And everyone else was pushed far, far away.

“How much does he understand?” Ray asked, as calmly as he could. “Did Jillian ever talk to you about that? Did she ever suggest... Look, don’t you think that someone should actually tell him about her?”

Bodie moved so quickly then as to take Ray’s breath away, slamming him up against the cold brick wall, his breath hot on his face, the contrast making Ray’s skin prickle all down his neck.

“Jillian didn’t tell me anything about him, Ray. Jillian didn’t want to tell me anything about him. She didn’t want me anywhere near. Of course, if you’d been here, it would have been different, wouldn’t it? She’d have loved you, Saint Doyle, friend to children and animals, better than everyone else, knowing better than anyone. She’d have appreciated that, of course she would, because you know everything, don’t you?”

Gritting his teeth, Ray broke Bodie’s hold, reached up to grab his shirt and dragged him in through the kitchen door – they were not going to have this out at high volume in the yard where everyone in a three street radius could hear them. Bodie tensed under the grip and broke from him as they went inside, regrouping and squaring up to him, and for a moment Ray was afraid that they were actually going to have a fight, and Bodie could hurt him if he wanted to, Bodie really could.

“Bodie!” he shouted, keeping his own hands low, stepping back and being as passive as possible.

And Bodie stopped, standing still, breathing heavily, looking at him like he’d still rather lay him out than not. Anger – it was all anger, Bodie was making it all into anger.

“Jillian’s dead, Bodie. You think she’d rather he go to one of those institutions than that you got involved with him?”

Bodie’s face went white. “You think that I’m going to..?” he began, then stopped, swallowing, and looked away. “Get out.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Get out. Do you know what? I thought you did know something, Doyle, I thought you knew quite a bit, but you don’t. You don’t have the first fucking clue. So just - go away.”

“I never should have come in the first place.” Ray didn’t want to mutter it as he left – it felt like something people would say on a TV soap, or one of the arguments his sister and her husband seemed to have on a recreational basis, the kind of thing that usually made him roll his eyes. But stupid and unreasonable as it was, what Bodie said hurt – or rather, Bodie shouting at him hurt, in a way he couldn’t rationalise and he wanted to wound back with all the viciousness of a counter-punch.

And he should never have come. He should never have thought it was a good idea to get mixed into a situation he could scarcely begin to comprehend, even though things had already headed towards definitively broken after whatever the hell that, that _kiss_ had been – power? dominance? Bodie just playing with his head? – hadn’t that been enough clue to head for the hills? Well maybe he was the fool after all. And he didn’t need telling twice.

Slamming the front door behind him, Ray set off walking, not caring where he was headed, the ground smacking hard beneath his feet and the softly falling rain barely registering as he wiped his eyes fiercely with the back of his hand.

\- - -

Perhaps there was a loveliness to Stockton, but Ray didn’t find it as he paced rapidly, aimlessly through the streets, one row of turn-of-the-century terraces much resembling another, offering no distractions from his thoughts.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this angry with someone who wasn’t himself.

But surely he could blame himself too, he thought, laughing darkly. How the hell had he let it get to this? When had it ever been the plan to let Bodie get under his skin? He was his work partner, that was all it was - they might as well have sat across an office from each other and shared typewriter tape, and that was nothing, ought to be nothing.

If Bodie let him down, if Bodie hurt him, then there ought to be someone else, another friend, or a girlfriend, or a wife or someone that Ray could bitch to about it, someone who mattered more.

When, exactly, had it got to a place where no one mattered more than Bodie?

Quite suddenly, coming to the end of a street and turning left, the vista opened up and he saw the river ahead of him. Crossing another road, he walked up to the metal fencing that edged the embankment, and looked down at the water, which was pockmarked and turbulent with the rain that – he realised now – was still falling. His hair was wet, sticking to the side of his face and his trousers soaking and cold, only his hands warm as he clenched his fingers in his jacket pockets, fists ready to fight anything.

_Rain and rain and rain and rain and rain_ – that’d been a song at his school. The rain that rose and covered the Earth and swept everything away.

Didn’t sound like such a bad idea.

Out on the water, a tree branch floated past, and then a plastic bag, on their way out to sea. The beach wasn’t that far away from this town, Ray recalled from the road map. Had Jillian taken Ben to the beach? Would he have enjoyed that? How much fun would the sea be if you couldn’t make a sandcastle or swim?

Ray had known a man in the police who’d lost a leg after a stab wound had gone septic, and it was after that that he’d taken up swimming, going every weekend. He’d said the water made him feel free.

If Bodie was not his problem - shouldn’t be his problem - then Ben really wasn’t, but Ray felt his chest tighten with worry anyway – so many, so very many questions.

He’d been wrong to goad Bodie about what would happen to Ben. What options were there, after all? And he himself could offer Bodie money, perhaps, to supplement what the sale of the household goods raised. Make sure Ben went to the best place possible. And yet it wouldn’t be enough. A ‘place’ was never going to be what a child deserved.

But then you had Bodie, who’d taken himself away from his home, from what was presumably his family, with all possible speed. Maybe he didn’t see ‘home’ in the same way as everyone else.

It made no difference, who deserved what, when there were almost nothing to have anyway. And thousands of children who weren’t Ben were stuck in that one just the same.

“...and I say, what the fuck gives you the right to start the inquisition every time I go out shopping?”

The voice was loud, irate and female, and Ray looked up from where he was leaning on the railing to see a couple coming towards him, marching along in matching raincoats, dragging a terrier on a lead who looked as if he would have liked to say that coming out in this weather had not been his idea.

“You took the car!” the woman’s companion, a burly man, was arguing in reply, with equal volume. “Why would you take the car to get clothes in town? Not like you can park anywhere. And you didn’t buy anything to carry anyway.”

“Didn’t know that when I set off, did I?”

“You took the car for three hours and you’re telling me you were busy _not_ buying clothes?”

The woman let out a heavy, exasperated sigh. “In case you haven’t noticed, Mr Bloody Detective, it’s been raining for a bloody week! I wasn’t walking for twenty minutes in the rain.”

“You’re in the rain now.”

“Because the dog can’t shit in the car! Or maybe you’d rather it did so that I couldn’t go anywhere on my own for one afternoon!”

They had passed him without any apparent sign of either noticing or caring that he was there, and as they finally went out of Ray’s earshot, he winced and turned back to look at the river. He wondered, automatically, routinely, if the woman was lying, and if so why. Her partner didn’t seem like a barrel of laughs, but then he might be at the end of his tether. Or then again, he might be an obsessive control freak tightening the screws. Maybe she’d just met a friend of hers he didn’t approve of, rightly or wrongly. Maybe she’d even been buying him a present. Maybe she was off getting seen for an illness he didn’t know about. Maybe she was having an affair. Maybe she’d just needed three hours alone.

Why did people lie to each other?

Not that Bodie had ever, precisely, lied to him. Ray had never, it was true, really thought to ask ‘Oh, by the way, do you have a wife or disabled son that I don’t know about?’

Leaning forward on the railing, he bent his head down and sighed. His stomach rumbled unhappily, and, looking back at the town behind him, he tried to figure out what route might most quickly lead him to somewhere selling sandwiches.

But something else was bothering him. Something beyond the hunger and the weary, well-trodden sense of helplessness.

He thought again about the argument he’d just heard. There’d been an association he’d held for a moment in his mind, something that had triggered his policeman’s notebook reflex and he couldn’t for the life of him think what it was, now, his brain all clouded up with introspection.

_You’re thinking too much again_ , Bodie would say to him sometimes, when he found Ray sitting staring into space, chin in hand. Cuff him lightly round the ear, or throw something at him – a newspaper, a chocolate bar, a disarmed grenade, depending on the impishness of his mood – and get Ray back into the moment.

It was not one-way traffic, him and Bodie and the business of keeping half sane. He missed Bodie. All those Christmases, he’d missed him, and over the last several years, those four or five days had always been the longest they’d ever spent apart.  No wonder it felt like losing a limb.

He’d asked Bodie once what he used the holiday overtime money _for_ , anyway, since like Ray he scarcely had time to spend anything and one look at his wardrobe or his drinks cupboard would rule out the most obvious theories, and his work kept him in a fine supply of fast cars.

That was it. Part of it at least – Ray stood up straight and took a deep breath. That was part of it. That was what had been nagging him.

And this settled it. Whether he wanted to see Bodie or not, he had to go back to Jillian’s house.

Or at least, to somewhere very near it.

\- - -

Chapter Five

\- - -

“Do you know where she was going?” Ray asked Madge as soon as she opened her front door to him.

She raised an eyebrow. “’Scuse me, what was that?”

“Jillian!” Ray stepped towards her, holding out his hands, invigorated by the simple energy of theory and deduction. “She was killed in a car accident, wasn’t she? So she had to be on a road, and if she was on the road she was going somewhere, but where? And who with? She only had a provisional driving licence and there’s no sign anywhere at hers that she kept a car – she was organised but there’s no tax documents, no insurance, nothing.”

To his surprise, Madge laughed at him. It was brief, a burst of sound almost like a yell, and didn’t make her smile. Then she took a deep breath and folded her arms: “So it happens at last! I was wondering how long it would take two educated blokes like yourselves to spare a moment to look beyond the end of your noses.”

Ray, nonplussed, stepped back. “I just didn’t...”

“You didn’t think. You thought you’d turn up and see her whole life, just like that,” Madge snapped her fingers. “Her and the bairn. Take one look and you know it all, don’t you? Southerners!” she finished, and spat.

Ray could have protested that both he and Bodie hailed from north of the Watford gap, but he took her point.

“I keep getting told I know everything today,” he said instead, shrugging. He felt very tired – the stiffness in his limbs from the morning had never dissipated, his muscles aching as if he were bruised all over. “Seems to me that I’m just questions.”

Madge sighed. She sounded tired too. The house behind her was quiet, so presumably the children were off to their swimming, but it must have been quite a twenty-four hours for her all round.

And she was grieving. Ray kept forgetting that. He wouldn’t have if this were a job, but any illusions he’d had of bringing some professional distance to this situation were rapidly fading.

“Jill was going to a weekend thing with her church, down past Northallerton,” Madge told him, almost gently. “Plan was that she would go in the afternoon, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and come back every night – they had these things once a month, just about, and that was what she always did, the others stayed in this B&B but she came back, it’s not so very far.

“Thing was, Jill wasn’t going to go, not this time. No one had space in their car for her. ‘I’ll watch him anyway,’ I told her, ‘You have a bubble bath, open a bottle, treat yourself.’ So we got him over, and we were standing on the pavement chatting when her friend Kenneth and his wife drove up - from the church, you know. They’d got space, their daughters weren’t coming – refused flat, it sounded like – teenagers, you know. And Jillian was so happy. She ran to get her things and then off she went.”

Madge’s voice had gone low; she turned away from him, covering her mouth for a moment.

Ray closed his eyes, not wanting to think about it, seeing it anyway: Good person, wrong place, wrong time. It never got any easier to accept.

“And the couple?” he made himself ask.

Blinking, visibly composing herself, straightening her hair and her overall as if by reflex, Madge shrugged. “Victoria called me. Kenneth’s wife. From the hospital. Well, she got a nurse to do it. She’s in a bad way, it seems, they were taking her to surgery but she made someone call me to make sure Ben was OK, let me know about Jill. I called the hospital myself, yesterday morning – it’s all taken care of, they say, the next of kin’s been informed. And I think, right, here comes himself then, the father.  And lo and behold you two show up. How did you think I knew what had happened?”

Ray closed his eyes again and twisted to lean back against the wall, wincing, berating himself for every kind of fool. If he’d been this blind and stupid at work, he’d probably have got someone killed.

But this wasn’t work. This wasn’t distant. This was getting him right in his chest and every screw-up he made was just...

“Seeing past your nose depends, maybe, on what’s in your head,” Madge offered after a moment or two. “Look, do you want a cup of tea?”

He looked at her, scanning her face for any sign of being mocked, then nodded silently, and she stood back to let him in.

As Ray got through the door, he realised that Bodie was standing in the hall, poised in the act of coming out of the living room. His face had the tracks of tears.

They met each other’s gaze, Ray ready for protestation, denial, anger – most of all for anger.

But, “We just told him, about Jill,” Bodie said, simply, and his voice cracked, high and out of control and breaking, and Ray stepped forward without thinking, without reasoning, without any ability to resist and drew him into his arms.

\- - -

“You don’t know what it’s like,” Bodie said to Ray, at length. Madge had left them alone in her kitchen, having gone back to sit with Ben.

Bodie had said he wasn’t sure if Ben had understood, if he’d just become upset because Bodie was, or maybe just because he was afraid of him.

Ray had nodded slowly, and hadn’t offered an opinion. Bodie could come at this at his own pace –that was reasonable enough.

“No, I don’t know what it’s like,” Ray said now, because it was only the truth, and from the way Bodie looked up at him after he said it, Ray was fairly sure the apology had been understood.

“It’s...” Bodie took a deep breath, and Ray didn’t try to prompt him. He couldn’t put words into Bodie’s mouth, not any more. Because truly he didn’t understand, and what was so extraordinary - what was so incredible that he almost wanted to pinch himself - was that Bodie seemed ready to try and actually explain.

“It’s the thinking you’ll have a child and then thinking – once you’re past the going crazy and the sheer bloody weirdness of it – thinking, maybe, maybe for your kid it’ll be different, it’ll be better, that you’ll make it better for them. And then this – _this_ – is what they get out of life. And it’s not their fault, they’re a kid. So maybe it’s yours. Your punishment.”

“Bodie,” Ray protested, and did reach out now, took his arm. “That’s ridiculous. You don’t honestly think..?”

“Jillian did.”

The way Bodie was breathing, Ray thought, would normally make him think he was hurt, if he’d heard it over the RT or the phone in isolation - that he was making some muscle work for him despite being strained and torn.

“Jillian thought it was the sins of the fathers, all that. And fuck, Ray, if that was true, with the things I’ve done? He’d be all this and worse. Not that she cared about... the army stuff – it was other things she didn’t like about me.” Taking another deep, shuddering breath, he looked away, but didn’t pull his arm from under Ray’s hand.

Ray let his fingers tighten, just slightly.

“When I went to Middlesbrough that night last year,” Bodie continued, “it was for Ben. He was ill – dying. Pneumonia. Jillian called me. I don’t know, maybe she thought it was the proper thing to do. And she was just about frantic, she was probably barely thinking at all. He really... they really thought it was the end. Except, then, it wasn’t. By the time I got there, his fever had gone down, he was opening his eyes, crisis over.”

Ray thought back to the weary, empty figure Bodie had been in the shower that night, trying to get clean of many things, perhaps, but not least of all the blood from his head wound.

“So who hit you?”

Bodie gave a short laugh. “No idea. I picked a fight in the car park with the first bloke I could, just for the sake of it. Thought it would make me feel better, it didn’t. Got myself into the shower, still felt awful. Then you had to show up, limping along, trying to give yourself a heart attack.”

His arm still hadn’t moved, and Ray’s hand still rested over it.

“I never knew what she wanted,” Bodie said softly. “Not really. I kept out of the way, sent her money every month, signed the forms. But then she called me, that night in Middlesbrough, she wanted me there. She had me as her next of kin, her executor. Why would she do that if she hated me? I thought maybe one day we’d understand each other, but...”

There was a pause. Ray made himself keep quiet, bit back all the platitudes he wanted to offer, and eventually Bodie started up again.

“Talking to him, just now - I've never been with him like that before. I wasn’t there when he was born. Wanted to be. Not that I would have seen him, because she says – said - they took him away from her at once. Then they told her about it all, and I don’t know how much she took in, and then I did visit and she had to try and explain to me, tell me about keeping him too, and well, there were probably a thousand better ways to handle that than the way I did.”

He shook his head, looking away into space.

The next silence stretched longer.

“I could have told you,” Bodie said at last.

Ray nodded. “You could have done. But it’s not my business, is it?”

The words came out more like a serious question than he’d intended.

“Ray...” Bodie leaned forward, and opened his mouth again, frowning, searching for words, and Ray waited, his mouth dry with anticipation.

“Well, he’s asleep for now,” Madge pronounced, striding into the kitchen, grabbing a chair and sinking down onto it with a sigh. She stretched out her legs and fumbled in her apron for her cigarette packet. Lighting up, she took a long drag and sighed again. Her hands had trembled ever so slightly as she lifted the lighter.

“So, what’s happening to him then?” she asked briskly, slamming the lighter to the table-top with a crack, the rough practicality of a woman who knows that disasters come and go but meals still need to be planned.

Ray tensed at the question, but then noticed that Bodie hadn’t. His face had gone calm and blank again - matter-of-fact, businesslike.

It was part of what Ray had come to understand about why Cowley valued Bodie, even early on in their partnership when every point in his favour had been a surprise: Bodie under pressure was a man above most men. There was a place where cold objectivity became tactical brilliance, and Bodie pretty much lived there.

Which was why it was a problem, because living where you worked was no one’s idea of healthy.

“She’ll be here soon,” Bodie said now, and Ray frowned, confused.

“Who? The cat’s mother?” Madge asked acerbically, saving Ray the effort.

Bodie picked at the table edge. “No. Mine.”

\- - -

“Today was only supposed to be my bloody annual leave, you know? Kids out at the pool, I was going to put my feet up and have an hour-long bath.” Madge put the plate of ham sandwiches she’d just made onto the table with a snort of disapproval. Ray, at the sink, filling three glasses of water, found himself actually smiling.

They were in Madge’s kitchen again – Bodie had gone back to Jillian’s house for a few more hours of sorting and packing, refusing offers of help with such a definitive air of wanting to be alone that Ray hadn’t pushed him.

In fact, he’d almost been relieved to be apart. Between him and Bodie now was something so new as to feel almost raw, definitely unsettling and distinctly dangerous.

At some point in all this, he was sure, he’d been trying to avoid letting things change.

Whilst Ray had tried to make himself useful with the laundry (a skill for which Madge had gone so far as to pat him on the back) Madge had given Ben his lunch, and then turned her attention to theirs, leaving Ben with the television and _Pebble Mill_. Watching Ben more closely, Ray still couldn’t determine whether the boy was as aware of what was going on as anyone, or just reacting instinctively to food, touch - bright colours maybe. It was not something he felt any ability to judge, not least when any and every possible answer provoked such intense emotions in himself.

He could have asked Madge what she, or Jillian, had thought. And yet he felt embarrassed to. As if whatever their conclusion was, they must have felt it to be obvious and he could only risk being insulting, somehow or other. And it was not his business, and he needed to be clear – very clear - in his own mind, his Saint Doyle fix-everything mind, about that.

Food on the table, Ray went to fetch Bodie, who he found in the hall of Jillian’s house, on the telephone.

“...I appreciate it, thank you,” he was saying, rather stiffly but seemingly genuine. “Do you know Jillian’s neighbour, Madge Dickinson? She’ll be here, I have to be back in London by then. Yeah, she can do that. No, he’s all sorted out. OK, cheers.”

He put the receiver down. “That was a friend of Jillian’s, apparently. From their church, she said. Heard about it all, wanted to help with the packing and the funeral and everything, and fuck knows she’s probably better set up to know what Jillian would have wanted – service and hymns and stuff - so...”

Ray smiled encouragingly. “Yeah, they’ll get it right. That’s the right thing, definitely.”

“Seemed to think Ben ought to go to it,” Bodie continued, frowning. “He usually went to services, the woman said. Well, that’ll be out of my hands. Lunch, you say?” He brushed past Ray and went briskly out of the front door, and Ray wondered if he too was nervous of what they might now be tempted to say to each other.

Once you’d started telling the truth, after all, it could become a habit. And Ray had as yet given Bodie no reason to think that all his revelations might be met kindly.

\- - -

Having finished lunch, which had been a quiet meal, the conversation primarily carried by Madge running a monologue whilst constructing her week’s shopping-list, Madge and Ray had migrated to Jillian’s house to finish up packing and tidying, and Bodie had disappeared altogether.

It was just after half past two when Ray, who was carrying a shopping bag of canned food from Jillian’s house to Madge’s, saw a sleek, silver Mercedes draw up on the other side of the road, instantly calling attention not only for itself but for its incongruousness on the street.

When a smartly dressed woman who looked to be in her mid-fifties got out and looked inquisitively across at him, he had to consciously correct his gaping expression. What he had expected Bodie’s mother to be like he wasn’t sure – something like his own, probably; soft sweaters, blurry edges, a neat, unremarkable perm, practical shoes, a conglomeration of sentimentally important jewellery that didn’t match but seem as much part of her as her smile.

“Is this Madge Dickinson’s house?” the woman asked Ray, abruptly. Her voice was clear and not a little commanding. She was in a neatly-tailored jacket and skirt, her ash-blonde hair up in a bun held in place by a complex scaffold of pins, one simple set of pearls round her neck.

Ray nodded, slowly. “You’re Mrs Bodie?” he asked, because he still almost couldn’t believe it.

She smiled now, open and friendly, coming towards him and holding out her hand. “Yes, that’s right. Do call me Harriet. Please tell me, how is my grandson?”

Ray shook her hand. “Ben seems to be... I don’t know, to be honest,” he admitted. “Madge has been brilliant, she’s been with him mostly. We’ve tried to explain, but I don’t know whether he... You know about him?”

Mrs Bodie gave a sad smile. “Oh yes, I know Ben. Since she moved back up here, Jillian was kind enough to bring him to visit me a few times. I would have come to her, of course, far easier for her that way, but she liked to keep her own space and one can only respect that. It doesn’t seem so bad,” she continued, looking over the street. She sighed, and looked at Ray again. “Take me to him, please.”

She was like a headmistress, Ray thought. A nice one, full of authority and yet with some indefinable quality that made you want to please her. He could imagine her both disciplining and enchanting children with ease.

Still reeling, he lead the way along Madge’s front path and pushed the door open, ushering ‘Harriet’ into the front room, where Ben met her with a rapid exertion of limbs and vocal cords, and she knelt down beside him, not seeming to be concerned about her suit and the proximity of various food bowls, and drew him into a hug.

“My poor boy, my poor baby,” she was saying, softly, and Ray felt a tightness in his chest that didn’t ease as he looked down the hall and realised that Bodie was also in the house, having maybe come in the back way, now watching the scene between his mother and his son, looking pale and almost nauseous.

Was this the first time Bodie had seen his mother since leaving home? Ray knew better than to ask.

He moved away from the living room door and towards Bodie, herding him back across the hall to the kitchen.

“She seems... very nice,” Ray offered, when they were safely inside, with the door closed.

Bodie had taken a seat at the table and for a moment Ray wondered if he’d heard him at all.

“She’s great,” Bodie said, though, and he was, Ray saw, literally gritting his teeth between sentences in the effort of speech. “She’ll fight for him. Give him the best of everything.” He nodded, several times, as if trying to address himself. “Jillian would want her to be the one. She’d want the best. And then there’s... She’d approve, you know, the God thing. My mother will certainly see to that.”

He sighed, and Ray had a sense, again, that he was now primarily addressing himself, forcing out thoughts he couldn’t make himself hear otherwise.“Jillian thought she was leaving that behind, when she came to London in the seventies, and her parents pretty much disowned her for trying. But she just wanted a little more air to breathe, that was all. If it hadn’t been for me, she’d have gone back to the fold in time.”

The silence stretched, Bodie still with his eyes closed, until Ray had to say something.

“Bodie, when you were a kid...” he began, not even sure where he was going, the number of questions he had.

“Please, just don’t, OK?”

Ray tried reaching out a hand to touch his arm, but Bodie shook it off. “Please, Ray, you don’t want to hear this, just leave me alone.”

\- - -

 “I think this thing actually belongs to the Health Authority,” Madge remarked, as she and Ray wrestled with the support chair, which was indeed extremely heavy, as they took it out to Harriet’s car. “But then Ben’s Nan only lives in Yarm, don’t she? So that’s the same people, probably, being the same county, but there’ll be a form or something I suppose. Sounds, thought, like she’s the sort who’d figure that out for themselves. And tell the Social off her own bat too – why bother, that’s what I say? Precious good they do.”

“Do you think Bodie knows Jillian and his mother were in touch?” Ray had asked her earlier, whilst they were still in the house. She hadn’t brought it up when Bodie had explained his plans, which now seemed odd, and it was bothering him. He felt instinctively that, if Bodie didn’t know, it might be a pretty painful revelation that his wife had managed to re-forge links he himself had either failed at or never, apparently, felt up to attempting.

Madge had raised an eyebrow. “Well, he knows Jillian moved back to round here where they all grew up, doesn’t he? He knows that his Mam was half an hour away from Jill all these years. Has to have crossed his mind, doesn’t it? So if he’s not asking, he doesn’t want to know.”

They finally got the chair over the front step and through the front gate, and at her suggestion they set it down for a breather, during which she lit up.

The children were out in the street again, a collection of boys with a football being shooed to the back alley by one woman, three girls parading a doll and a bear in a battered toy pram, another solemnly walking a large black Labrador whose head was roughly level with her own. Ray watched them carefully; they took no especial notice of the house, or of the chair, or even of him, a stranger, too caught up in their own existences, in the strange surreal perspective that makes every childhood odd.

“She lost a bairn – Ben’s Nan,” Madge said to him quietly, after a short pause, tapping her ash neatly to the pavement. “Jill talked to me about it, talking about what women could go through and still keep going. Her husband died – this’ll be your mate’s Dad, I’m guessing. Dropped dead in front of them one day, just like that, one of them heart attacks. Anyway, she was pregnant, the baby came too soon, but she took it home – a girl, I think it was – and had her three weeks, which as Jill told it was three weeks longer than anyone told her she’d have. Jill was only wee herself, but she remembered the Vicar asking them all to pray about it at their church.” Madge smiled, shaking her head. “Said she was never sure what she was supposed to be asking for.”

Ray frowned. “But that was... If her husband died – so was Bodie around, then, when this was happening?”

Madge shrugged, though not unkindly. “Jill didn’t mention him. Jill never mentioned him much. Dare say, though. Terrible thing.”

Ray turned away, acid rising in his throat. “It is terrible,” he agreed, and then suddenly it snapped inside him, something, the control, the thing you used that made you calm instead of truthful, and he wanted to lash out, to smash and rage.

He kicked the chair, then the wooden fence, over and over, ramming his foot against it till one of the boards cracked, pain jolting through his toes.

“It. Is. Fucking. Terrible. Why, though? Why is the world so fantastically abysmally shit to everyone the whole fucking time?”

When he looked up, panting, he was aware of the three girls with the pram down the round, giggling with delighted horror from behind their hands, and Madge just standing there, arms folded, considering him.

“So that love is useful,” she said, calmly, and with a weariness, a practised hopefulness, that suddenly made him wonder how she’d come to have to find herself that answer.

\- - -

Ray and Madge having got the last of the absolute essentials into Harriet’s car – and it having been swiftly decided that she would be back, in any case, to help with the funeral plans, giving her an opportunity to collect the rest of Ben’s library of picture books about horses (Ray had no idea so many different ones could possibly exist) – Ray offered to finish up by carrying Ben out.

He’d been keeping an eye out for Bodie, who he hadn’t seen for quite a while now. He’d even tried to delay things a little, just in case Bodie needed time to gather the strength to come out and say, well, something - anything.

But with Bodie still nowhere in evidence, and evening and Ben’s dinner time coming, and with neither Harriet nor Madge apparently about to raise the topic, at least in his hearing, there was nothing left for it.

One of the women had changed Ben into more suitable clothes - a brightly coloured tracksuit covered with sports logos and some Batman socks.

“Nice,” Ray observed, gesturing to them. “I used to watch that on the TV when I was a student.”

Ben blinked at him, then wiggled his feet. Or, at least, Ray thought it was a distinct movement.

“I’m going to get you out to the car now,” Ray continued, “So your – your Nan can get you home, yeah?”

He reached down to pick Ben up – he was very light and slender, easy to lift, and Ray opted to put one arm under his shoulders, the other under his knees, not sure if the boy would be able to even get into position to cling on round his waist.

There really was a lot of Bodie about Ben’s face. Tempered, yes, with what must be his mother’s bone structure and hidden, a little, by the uneven childish teeth, but his eyes were just the same, dark and deep and suggesting mysteries at which Ray could only guess, gazing back at him uncertainly, an unknown quantity to be treated with caution.

“Do you want me to follow you in the car and get him out the other end?” Ray asked, as they emerged into the fresh air.

“Not to worry,” Bodie’s mother reassured him. “I’ve called my niece, she’ll be around there by now, getting the tea ready, and her husband too. They’ve got children, I know they’ll just love having Ben as part of the family.”

“Oh, I see.” Ray, now picturing a whole clan of Bodies, felt a pang of wistfulness. There would have been Christmases, then, for certain. Big gatherings, full of light and laughter, not so different from his own, and none of them for Bodie.

It didn’t make sense.

“I could try and find Bodie if you want?” he offered suddenly. “He might want to go, I know you haven’t...”

Harriet smiled sadly, and patted his arm. “Oh, William, won’t want to see me,” she said lightly, but sighing. “He hates me, I’m afraid to say. Barely even made it through calling me on the telephone, though thank goodness he did, of course. I only ever wanted what was best for him, but then – well, sometimes that can happen with children. I don’t know if you and Madge have your own but...”

Ray laughed, shaking his head. “No, I’m not... Madge’s husband is taking their kids swimming. I’m Bodie’s – William’s - friend.”

She drew back, slightly, and something in her reaction made him press forward. “I’m Bodie’s friend,” he repeated, more slowly, watching her. “I want what’s best for him as well.”

Her face, which had been so kind and warm a minute earlier, had gone hard. Her lips were pursed, her nose twitching. She looked like someone who, pushing through a perfectly innocuous door, had found themselves confronted with a public urinal.

She rallied herself, though, taking a deep breath and squaring her shoulders.

“Are you saying,” she began, with a calm, level, shut-down quality that was all-too-familiar, “that you and my son are... involved?”

Ray blinked at her, unsure for a moment whether to laugh or curl his lip in his own wave of dislike. Perhaps he could have been offended at the suggestion – he thought this afterwards, a great deal of time afterwards – but he more than anything in that moment he was angry.

So he lashed out. That was what it was, or at least, the first thing it was. And it was only the truth.

“Oh yes,” he said, quite clearly, quite distinctly, and with an edge in his voice. “I am very involved with your son. Is that a problem?”

She sighed - sad, and tired, and disappointed. “I’m sorry, I’m sure you’re a nice person,” she said, and as she looked up at him he realised that _she mean it kindly_. “But you have to understand that neither my daughter-in-law or I would want that kind of thing anywhere near Ben. I mean to say, for a child, any child, to be exposed to...” She stopped, pursing her lips, flushing, looking genuinely upset. “I think I’d better leave now.”

Ray could only stare as she made her way to open the door on the driver’s side. Having opened it, before she got in, she turned to look at him again.

“All sins can be washed clean in the Lord,” she said, firmly. “And for everything He has a purpose. He is always ready to welcome us.”

Ray bit his lip. He could not have said, just then, why he felt worse than if she’d cursed him.

She did get in, pulling the door behind her – not a slam, controlled – and checked her mirrors and indicated and finally – finally, it seemed to take hours – pulled out and drove away and out of sight.

Ray heard footsteps and turned. Bodie had materialised in Jillian’s front garden. For all Ray knew he’d been hiding, SAS-style, on the roof. He slowly approached and Ray swallowed and made himself meet his eye.

“I see,” Ray said.

Bodie raised his eyebrow, and shrugged. He was hugging his arms around himself and looked, somehow, rather small.

Ray’s life had been so simple forty-eight hours ago – and if he hadn’t known that at the time, did he ever now – but the feeling of understanding, of clicking into place, of _seeing_ Bodie as he’d never been able to before, no matter how much he tried? Well, he’d trade a lot of simplicity for that.

“Let’s get out of here, just for a bit, eh?” Ray suggested, seeing Madge standing in her own front door, watching them, and after a moment, Bodie nodded and followed him to the car.

\- - -

Chapter Six

\- - -

Ray had driven for a while, not really thinking about it, and when the temple had come in sight - a strange faux-Grecian edifice on a tall, isolated hill rising above the suburbs and shopping centres - he’d not been able to resist.

Parking near the top was easy enough, and a few minutes walking had them in full possession of the view, and a near empty expanse of field, filled with grass and clover and one or two dog-walkers well out of hearing distance. For a while, without discussing it, falling easily into step, they walked around the structure, Ray enjoying the feeling of earth under his feet rather than the slap of concrete and the reassuring familiarity of Bodie matching him pace-for-pace.

The sight of the tall ionic columns was a strange echo of the one holiday he’d ever taken to the Mediterranean - back in his student days when he’d been with Sophie, who’d paid for everything with a bewildered, contented shrug; all her father’s money. He’d felt at the time that she wanted him there to look after her, that she felt herself to have him on retainer, and even the sun and fine food and wine hadn’t quite let him ignore that and just enjoy it.

And the irony of that had been that he loved looking after people. When he’d got into street fights protecting his area, or when he’d tried to do the same thing on the beat, when he’d dated women to delight in pleasing them, when he’d made Bodie toast on a hundred thousand mornings, it was all the same thing.

Except, maybe not, maybe not all exactly the same.

He realised he was staring at Bodie, and looked away into the distance. The sky was too grey for a perfect postcard vista. No doubt when it was clearer one could see farther, but for the moment Ray was just grateful that, for while, it seemed to have stopped raining.

“Penshaw Monument. Haven’t been here in a while,” Bodie said, sitting down next to him on the edge of the stone floor, which rose high enough from the grass to make a comfortable seat, and at which Ray had finally found himself coming to a natural halt.

Ray waited, watching him.

Bodie looked back. “Am I the one saying something first?” he asked, with just the slightest raise of his eyebrow, and Ray took in the words and tried not to rest too much on them.

Ray shrugged. “If you want to,” he said quietly. “I’m listening.”

“I like the sound of my own voice, mind, but today?” Bodie gave a short laugh, ripping up tufts of grass from between the paving slabs.

“So be very quiet tomorrow,” Ray suggested, gently, and Bodie looked up at him again – quick, interrogative – and Ray realised that if his own fear had diminished, Bodie still saw them on the edge of breaking.

“I’m listening,” Ray said again, and that seemed to satisfy him.

“I had a wonderful fourteenth birthday,” Bodie began, staring forward, one knee drawn up and hugged to his chest. “Jillian could probably have told you more about it - she was there, half the kids on the street, all the children of all the people my mother knew from church – full nine yards. The house is full, the younger ones making a racket, and it’s boring, really, for teenagers, but none of us have anything much better on because we’re good, saintly really, and my mother didn’t have alcohol to steal even if we’d thought of it. Some of them slope off to the garden and start – I don’t know, football or something. But that leaves me and Danny in my bedroom. And at first I’m just glad he didn’t desert me, because it’s my birthday, but he was my friend, so... and then...” Bodie waved his hand, dismissing it or maybe without the words. “You know, things happened.”

“At your fourteenth birthday party?”

Bodie shot a glance at him. “He kissed me, alright? We’re not talking the Fall of Babylon here. And it wasn’t... he pecked me on the cheek, and we laughed, and I... anyway,” he flushed, and looked away again. “It didn’t feel wrong. It didn’t feel like something we shouldn’t be doing. And for fifteen minutes it’s the best day of my life, ever, and then the door opens and about ten kids pile in because they’ve switched to Hide and Seek, and, well. There’s a scene.  Jillian saw that, too. Most of the neighbourhood did, I suppose. My mother was so ashamed, I suppose, that’s why she... I think if it hadn’t been like that, a big party, she might have been calmer about it.”

He took a deep breath in through his nose. His hands, gripping his knee, had gone white. “It wasn’t the first problem, but it was the last straw, for both of us. There’d been – it hadn’t been easy, before that. She said she didn’t want me, and I said I’d leave, or it might have been the other way round. And only...” the emotion rose in his voice now, suddenly, and he swallowed, struggling. “For Ben, I did it for Ben today. Only for him.”

Ray frowned. “I’m sorry I still just... I really don’t understand.”

Bodie looked at him and there was a smile, suddenly, across his face, fond and exasperated. “Why on earth would you think you could?” He laughed, short but bright, leaning back, shoulders relaxing, his whole body now loose with amusement. “Ray, Ray, Ray, I was fourteen, I was a kid - I don’t understand it. Or Mum. Or Jillian, or myself, or you least of all, you mad bastard, but obviously you have to know it all, you have to make it make sense, you have to have reasons that fit, you have to have answers, whether they exist or not.”

He paused, steadying himself, and took a breath. “But thank you.”

“For what?” Ray asked, almost laughing himself.

“Being involved.” Bodie was still looking at him, and the smile had gone, his face serious.

Ray licked his lips. “Ah. You heard that, eh?”

“I know I’m not the easiest partner in the squad, I do know that. And bear in mind, of course, that you’re no rest cure yourself. But, yeah, thank you.”

“I am, you know.”

“Am what?”

“Involved.” Ray leant back and looked at the sky. The clouds seemed darker to the west, probably another shower coming soon - they’d have to get back to the car and then to the house, sort out dinner, weather another night on the floor, try and get their heads in gear for the working week.

And more, maybe. Ben was with his grandmother, and that was right, but there was never a limit on second chances, for anyone, with anyone - Ray ought to know that well enough, and he could show Bodie. They could work something out.

They. Them. Together. It was that simple.

“That’s what I really have understood this weekend, if nothing else,” Ray continued, calmly, because it _was_ simple. It was easy. It was obvious. “I’m involved with you. More involved than I’ve ever been with anyone, and you matter to me more than anything.”

He was tempted to add: _So there_.

Continuing to stare up at the sky, he was aware of Bodie, next to him, shuffling awkwardly.

“You picked a fine specimen,” Bodie said softly.

“No I didn’t,” Ray countered briskly. “He was foisted off onto me by my bloody boss, who is entirely too clever for his own good. But it is what it is.” He turned now and looked at Bodie, and saw that he was smiling, just a little, and something flipped over in his chest, a bright sensation like the sun waiting behind the clouds, burning fiercely, knowing its moment will come.

“And what it is, is us.” Ray continued, “Come rain or shine. And this week it rained.” He leant closer, nudging Bodie’s head with his own, pressing his nose into the side of Bodie’s cheek, letting himself feel that it was good, that it was right, thrilling and rapturous. “And sometimes we shine.”

Bodie kissed him then, or he kissed Bodie, carefully at first, then deeper, Ray finding that the building, aching hunger for this that he’d grown so slowly aware of was only being stoked further, the wanting expanding and growing, seeking more, a great deal more.

But not here. They pulled back from each other, grinning stupidly, Ray thought, and that made him grin again. It was all he could do not to lean in once more, explore Bodie’s neck, get in more of the scent of him, the glorious contented pleasure of contact, of welcome.

They had time.

Ray stood up, offering his hand to hoist up Bodie, and they brushed the gravel from their trousers and walked, rather quickly, still in step, back to the car and the rest of their journey.

\- - -

 

 

\- - -

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art for "This week it rained" by Halotolerant](https://archiveofourown.org/works/531133) by [Milomaus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milomaus/pseuds/Milomaus)




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